This paper uses two representative household budget surveys from the Kyrgyz Republic to analyze factors influencing participation and returns from different types of nonfarm activities in 2005 and 2006. Nonfarm activities are found to be most important for the poor, who are pushed out of...

We examine the effect of remittances on the legitimacy of democracy in Africa, testing whether remittance recipients are less likely to support democracy than are non-recipients. We hypothesise that the effect of remittances on support for democracy varies across groups of individuals sharing...

Little investigation has been made to explain why women are less likely than are men to support democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa. This gender difference in politics has been found in numerous studies and may hinder the much needed legitimation of democracy in this region. This paper addresses the...

Knowledge brokering has been explored in the innovation literature to understand how different innovation tasks are organised toward technological development. This paper reflects upon the role of different organisations as knowledge brokers in regulatory policy processes towards putting...

This paper discusses the entry of China into the game of foreign finance in Africa. It analyses the scope, destination and sectoral distribution of Chinese financial flows and trade in comparison with Western patterns and trends of aid, foreign direct investment FDI and trade. Chinas foreign aid...

How responsive are remittances to various disasters, both natural and human-made? And would remittances be affected by systemic financial crises (such as the 2008/09 financial crisis)? Using panel data on 23 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1980 to 2007, we find that...

In this paper we aim to measure and decompose the growth of frontier total factor productivity (TFP) in Tunisia over the period 1983-2001. We define frontier TFP growth as the shift of the economy's production frontier, which we obtain by solving for each year a linear program, a sort of...

This paper is a synthesis of research undertaken as part of the Research Into Use programme (RIU) to explore the question of how agricultural research can be used more effectively to improve agricultural production and farmers' livelihoods in developing countries. Many of the challenges the...

This paper develops a model positing a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth. The model is then applied to a panel of African countries using nonlinear estimating procedures. The growth-maximizing level of public investment is estimated at about 10 percent of GDP based on...

This paper examines the extent to which dependence on primary commodities in Sub-Saharan African(SSA) countries can be explained by low levels of absorptive capacity (the ability to acquire, internalize and utilize knowledge developed elsewhere). We examine the individual and combined effects of...