Globalisation or market integration in Sub-Saharan Africa is closely linked to the structural adjustment programmes. In this paper we focus on their dependence on politics and institutional characteristics of the countries concerned. In particular, we argue that one important explanation for the...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of island status and country size on institutional quality, and to determine if these institutional effects can explain the relatively strong economic performance of islands and small countries. One of the main findings of this paper is that...

The most important event in human economic history before the Industrial Revolution was the Neolithic transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to sedentary agriculture, beginning about 10,000 years ago. The transition made possible the human population explosion, the rise of...

Zambia’s experience in the 1990s illustrates that, on their own, policy changes will not redress decades of mismanagement, especially when the degree of commitment of the elite remains unaltered. In 1991, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy won the elections on a reform platform, promising...

The three “spheres” of society (governments, markets, and communities) are widely acknowledged yet the overall organization is analyzed only rarely, and interactions between the spheres have perhaps never been modeled. Fiske’s four relational models (community-sharing, authority-ranking,...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that the association between property rights institutions and income is weaker in countries with high social divisions. It argues that social divisions should have a negative effect on perceived institutional inclusiveness, which in turn should depress...

Most studies of the relation between economic freedom and growth of GDP have found a positive relation. One problem in this area is the choice of economic freedom measure. A single measure does notreflect the complex economic environment and a highly aggregated index makes it difficult to draw...