The study investigates disparities in social development in 144 countries worldwide. In the paper we aim to investigate cross-country differences in social development level in year 2011, as well as to estimate inequalities on the field. Secondly, we assess relative social development level...

Russia’s direct investment of about USD 3 billon in Southern Africa over the past decade has placed before the country’s government and corporate sector two choices in the accelerating race among foreign investors into Africa. The first choice is to follow the established path of direct...

This is the scientific report from a research programme which explored the current lack of a suitable public system for protecting GIs in Southern Africa. In contrast to the European Union, the current South African legal framework only provides for the protection of GIs as collective and, in...

This companion paper to Chatelain and Ralf (2012), “Spurious regressions with near-multicollinearity” put their results into the contexts of the history of statistics, of the current publication bias in applied sciences and of the substantive versus statistical significance debate. This...

Official flows account for close to half of capital flows to developing countries, and close to 90 per cent of receipts for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper documents trends in these official flows over the last three decades. The most striking trend has been declining aid volume. Following two...

The paper carries out a deep case study of the international aid that Equatorial Guinea receives. This is an extremely interesting country because, not being a failed state, it presents very low indexes in institutional quality. Its oil richness, which began to be exploited by foreign investors...

The international community is usually set against secessionist movements that threaten to break up existing states. At the same time, many fragmented countries receive development aid, which influences the political process there. The model presented here seeks to answer two questions: “Is...

This paper analyses inclusive growth that focuses on the creation of opportunities for all. Inclusive growth allows people to contribute to and benefit from economic growth, while pro-poor growth approaches focusing on welfare of the poor only to reduce inequality. Recently, economics literature...

I highlight some of the key econometric problems facing the literature on FDI spillovers. For the most part, the existing literature takes the approach of estimating production functions in which the total factor productivity (TFP) of the domestic firms in a particular industry/country is...

What is the relationship between state capacity, national identity, and economic development? This paper argues that increases in state capacity can lower the collective action costs associated with political and economic exchange by encouraging the formation of a common identity. This...