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...

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...

We estimate how random weather fluctuations affected infant mortality across 28 African countries in the past, combining high-resolution data from retrospective fertility surveys (DHS) and climate-model reanalysis (ERA-40). We find that infants were much more likely to die when exposed in utero...

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,...

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...

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963-2011 period. Guided by a model it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy...

There is a great deal of interest in the causes and consequences of conflict in Africa, one of the poorest areas of the world where only modest economic progess has been made. This paper asks whether post-colonial conflict is, at least in part, a legacy of historical conflict by examining the...