This paper examines the individual incentives to identify to one's ethnic group rather than to the nation, based on large sample surveys representative of seven capitals of West-African countries. Three main driving forces stand out. First, we show that education brings down ethnic salience at...

(english) To what extent did the colonial public policy influence the current regional inequalities in the Frenchspeaking West Africa? This paper uses the differences in development outcomes across the areas of the former French West Africa to show the existence of colonial long term effects on...

(english) Did colonization change the distribution of prosperity within French-speaking West Africa? Using a new database on both pre-colonial and colonial contexts, this paper gives evidence that Europeans tended to settle in more prosperous pre-colonial areas and that the European settlement...

This paper explores the impact of elections on economic policies and governance in developing countries. We distinguish between a structural effect, which increases accountability, and a cyclical effect which may be disruptive. Since the effects are offsetting, neither can be analyzed in...

(english) This paper investigates the dynamics of the informal sector in Madagascar during a period of fragile growth. Overall, the behavior of informal firms in terms of earnings, employment and capital accumulation points to a degree of heterogeneity which goes beyond a simple dualistic model...

(english) This article sets out to investigate the reasons why some household businesses decide to register and become formal (while others do not) in order to shed light on the origins of informality. We use qualitative as well as quantitative data on household businesses (HB) derived from...

(english) Democratic Republic of Congo has known dramatic events for the last three decades. Statistical social economic data did not exist really or not available in the period. The Informal Sector survey, the second phase of the 1-2-3 survey, carried out in 2004-2005 and conducted by the...

(english) This article highlights the main findings of an evaluation report on the impact of a microfinance program based in Antananarivo. It first provides background information on microfinance programs in Madagascar and on the market-demand for micro-loans. It then describes the main...

In spite of rapid economic growth for the last decades, the informal economy still has a predominant weight in Vietnam, and its share is not likely to decrease in the short term. Moreover, the international crisis started in 2009 had a negative impact on the informal sector. However, the...

(english) In spite of its predominant economic weight in developing countries, little is known about informal sector income dynamics vis-à-vis the formal sector. The few works using household surveys to tackle this issue, mainly consider some emerging countries. As a matter of consequence,...