To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...

Long-run trends in Africa’s well-being are provided on the basis of a new index of human development, alternative to the UNDP’s HDI. A sustained improvement in African human development is found that falls, nonetheless, short of those experienced in other developing regions. Within Africa,...

Much African land currently has low productivity and has attracted investors purchasing (or leasing) land as a speculative option on higher future prices or productivity. If land deals are to be beneficial they need to induce productivity enhancing investments. Some of these will be publicly...

In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries...

For Africa, a regional customs union is unlikely to realise net welfare gains (in the sense of trade creation dominating trade diversion) which cannot be attained through unilateral trade liberalization. Unilateral reform has often failed in Africa, however. A regional customs union tied to...

Does fractionalization change over (short periods of) time? If so, are there any substantial implications for economic performance? To answer such questions, we construct a new panel data set with measures of fractionalization for 26 former communist countries covering the period from 1989 to...

This paper examines whether, in the presence of trade preferences, Sub-Saharan African economies, and especially its poorest households, could gain from multilateral trade reform. The World Bank’s LINKAGE model of the global economy is employed to examine the impact first of current trade...

Is improved school accessibility an effective policy tool for reducing child labor in developing countries? We address this question using micro data from rural Tanzania and a regression strategy that attempts to control for non-random location of households around schools as well as classical...

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. In each case independence was followed by political...

This paper provides instrumental variables estimates of the response of aggregate private consumption to transitory output shocks in poor countries. To identify exogenous, unanticipated, idiosyncratic and transitory variations in national output we use year-to-year variations in rainfall as an...