or social relations. At the other are despotic states which dominate civil society. Yet there are others which are locked … into an ongoing competition with civil society and it is these, not the despotic ones, that develop the greatest capacity …) and civil society (representing non-elite citizens), where both players can invest to increase their power. The model …

Africa. But employment in African manufacturing has grown rapidly over the past 20 years. These employment gains have been … (iii) robust labor productivity growth in Africa's large firms. Limited employment growth in Africa's large manufacturing … manufacturing to raise living standards in Africa depends on indirect job creation by large firms through backward and forward …

As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent …'s economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus … Africa's post-independence maladies, we first review works that uncover the lasting legacies of colonial investments in …

The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala …

effect on income. However, in Africa rugged terrain afforded protection to those being raided during the slave trades. Since … the slave trades retarded subsequent economic development, in Africa ruggedness has also had a historical indirect … for Africa the indirect positive effect dominates the direct negative effect. Looking within Africa, we also provide …

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort towards Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a … celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey … contrasts the predominant "transformational" approach (West saves Africa) to occasional swings to a "marginal" approach (West …

Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data … exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves …

Africa and Latin America secured their independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin … America after 1820 and most of Africa after 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities … about a half-century (lost decades). The parallels suggest that Africa might be exiting from a period of post …

Using country- and region-level data, I investigate the effect of HIV/AIDS on fertility in Africa during 1985 …