By analysing the institutional structures of indigenous sub-Saharan African groups, this paper aims to highlight the effect that these institutions may have had, and continue to have, on contemporary institutional performance. Using ethnographic and anthropological data sources a set of...

Although growth has improved substantially in most African countries in recent years, poverty across the continent has fallen very little in the aggregate. There have been strong poverty reduction performances in some countries, but others exhibit higher poverty rates now than in 1990 despite...

Following closely the analytical approach adopted by Head and Mayer (2004) and Novy (2010), this paper derives a micro-founded bilateral trade cost measure for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a function of observable domestic and inter-national trade data. The derived measure of trade cost by Novy...

This paper contributes to the literature on tax performance in sub-Saharan African countries. A standard model of the determinants of tax revenue is augmented to include measures of indigenous pre-independence institutional structure constructed from anthropological data on the characteristics...

Given the significant inflows of foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the possibility of Dutch Disease has been a concern. Most macroeconomic models predict that aid inflows, especially if large and/or unanticipated (shocks), will lead to an appreciation of the real exchange rate and...

Growth improved substantially in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since 1990, but poverty in SSA as a whole has fallen by about a third, compared to by half or more in other developing regions. While some countries have had little or no success in reducing poverty, many have had...

Taxation can contribute to state-building through a tax bargain in which taxpayers are willing to increase compliance in return for improved government accountability. There is limited evidence for this in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where it is argued that the fiscal state is weak, with low tax...

This paper investigates the effect of ICT and e-formalization on tax mobilization efforts in sub-Saharan Africa. Using a panel of 42 countries from 1991 to 2018 and applying appropriate model specifications; the empirical findings show that there is strong support that ICT (mobile subscription...

We decisively reject the hypothesis that geographical factors influence long-run only indirectly, through the quality of institutions. The direct influence of geography on per capita incomes is robust to the inclusion of a sub-Saharan Africa dummy and other tests. We obtain our results by...

This paper provides analysis of the macroeconomic management implications of becoming an exporter of oil, taking the case of Ghana and applying to Uganda as a prospective exporter. The paper proceeds in two steps. First, we construct a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model of a...