The purpose of the paper is to show that the nature of the relationship between governance and democracy varies depending on how the two terms (of a political discourse) are defined, that when the definition of one term encompasses distinctive features of the other we find that governance and...

The term "party system", explained Giovanni Sartori, refers to the pattern of interactions among major parties. That pattern can be represented as a type and treated as a proper unit of analysis. When "party system" is defined in this way, it becomes clear that the scholarship lacks a direct...

The purpose of this paper is to explore in greater detail the nexus between party system change and democratic qualities. In doing so, we do not simply assess whether, how and to what extent qualities of democracy in East Africa are affected by the instability of the patterns of inter-party...

A 2015 World Bank report on attainment of Millennium Development Goals concludes that the number of extremely poor has dropped substantially in all regions with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa. We assess if poverty is in the African gene by revisiting the findings of Ashraf and Galor (2013,...

The motivations of the Arab Spring that have marked the history of humanity over the last few months have left political economists, researchers, governments and international policymakers pondering over how the quality of political institutions affect consumer welfare in terms of commodity...

The transition from Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has substantially shifted the policy debate from growth to inclusive growth. In this short note, we revisit the trust-growth nexus by exploiting a dataset on quality of growth (QG), recently made...

The paper extends Breggren et al. (2008, EE) on "trust and growth: a shaky relationship" by incorporating recent developments in the trust-growth literature and using a robust methodological underpinning that accounts for the presence of outliers. The empirical evidence is based on 63 countries....

The paper extends Breggren et al. (2008, EE) on "trust and growth: a shaky relationship" by incorporating recent developments in the trust-growth literature and using a robust methodological underpinning that accounts for the presence of outliers. The empirical evidence is based on 63 countries....

The study assesses the role of mobile phones and mobile banking in decreasing inequality in 52 African countries. The empirical procedure involves first, examining the income-redistributive effect of mobile phone penetration and then investigating the contribution of mobile banking services in...

We build on existing literature and contemporary challenges to African development to assess the role of political stability in fighting corruption and boosting corruption-control in 53 African countries for the period 1996-2010. We postulate that on the one hand, an atmosphere of political...