The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the...

Ghana can be considered a relative success story in Africa. We cite six variables - peace and stability, democracy and governance, control of corruption, macroeconomic management, poverty reduction, and signs of an emerging social contract - to suggest the country’s admirable political and...

The globalization of financial markets has led to an impressive rise of private commercial investment in emerging markets since 1990. This rise has been driven partly by the growth of equity investment funds - collective investment schemes where individual investors contribute to multiple...

In this paper, we apply a novel analytical technique—k-means clustering—to understand the relationship between the growth of firms and the availability of power in sub-Saharan Africa. We develop a classification of firms and show how firm clusters are distributed across industries and...

Conventional wisdom about US foreign policy toward Africa contains two popular assumptions. First, Democrats are widely considered the party most inclined to care about Africa and the most willing to spend resources on assistance to the continent. Second, the end of the Cold War was widely...

From the recent G8 Summit to UN declarations, calls for a Big Push in official development assistance by OECD countries are becoming more frequent and pressing. Although there may be a consensus among the donor community to increase giving, what impact will this new aid have on recipient...

Zimbabwe is a country on the edge. It may technically be at peace, but it is suffering war-like trauma to its polity and economy. The international community will soon likely confront the challenge of assisting the country's difficult transition from a bleak period of economic collapse and...

A number of proposals today support a substantial increase in foreign aid levels to sub-Saharan Africa even though this region already receives a historically unprecedented volume of aid. This essay reviews the evidence regarding the potentially negative effects of aid dependence on state...

Nigeria is currently classified by the World Bank as a "blend" country, making it the poorest country in the world that does not have "IDA-only" status. This paper uses the World Bank's own IDA eligibility criteria to assess whether Nigeria has a case for reclassification. Given that the country...

The world has increasingly recognized that private capital has a vital role to play in economic development. African countries have moved to liberalize the investment environment, yet have not received much FDI. At least part of this poor performance is because of lingering skepticism toward...