The paper reviews the principles and practical considerations involved in the choice between foreign and domestic financing of fiscal deficits, and derives a series of recommendations broadly applicable to Central and West African countries. The paper develops a simple analytical framework and...

Polycentric development in regions has many dimensions, which involve several definitions and measures. This paper tackles the problem of defining and measuring polycentricity under an integrated and multi- dimensional perspective. Firstly, the policy relevance of polycentricity is analysed....

This study employs spatial panel techniques to examine determinants of regional allocation of infrastructure investment made by the central government. Using a sample of 31 Chinese provinces over the 2001-2008 period, we derived four major empirical findings. First, there exist substantial...

One of the outstanding aims of most liberation movements has been to increase the economic well-being of their people, Guinea-Bissau being no exception in this respect. How far has the new Nation State succeeded in fulfilling this aim? A comparative analysis of the implementation of land...

We develop a multicountry model in which governments aim at excessive spending in order to serve the narrow interests of the group in power. This puts pressure on the monetary authorities to extract seigniorage, and thus affects the incentives countries would have to participate in a monetary...

Could a West African monetary union (either of the non-CFA countries, or all ECOWAS members) be an effective "agency of restraint" on fiscal policies? We discuss how monetary union could affect fiscal discipline and the arguments for explicit fiscal restraints considered in the European Monetary...

The growth literature has had problems explaining the "sub-Saharan African growth dummy" in cross-country regressions. Instead of taking the usual approach of focusing on long-run growth and assuming that sub-Saharan countries have homogenous parameters in growth regressions, we concentrate our...

This paper serves as a brief introduction and overview for a volume that provides a set of six case studies from West Africa in order to contribute to an assessment of the benefits of growth (or the cost of a lack of growth) for poverty reduction in those countries. The first part of the volume...

Tourism and related recreation activities play a significant role in the generation of income / foreign exchange and provision of employment opportunities. Against this backdrop, this paper aims at ascertaining empirically the impact of tourism on the West African economy from 2000 – 2004. The...