The authors turn to the large family of institutions that came into existence in post-Soviet Eurasia (and, in some ways, beyond it) over the last two decades. The researchers review their current state, agenda, real and perceived mandate, and their respective achievements and constraints. The...

Building upon earlier work by Willenbockel (2013; MPRA Paper No.51501), this study provides an extended ex-ante computable general equilibrium (CGE) assessment of the Tripartite Free Trade Agreement between the member states of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, the East African...

Can governments still use trade to reward and punish partner countries? While WTO rules and the pressures of globalization restrict states' capacity to manipulate trade policies, politicization of trade is likely to occur where governments intervene in markets. We examine state ownership of...

One of the outstanding aims of most liberation movements has been to increase the economic well-being of their people, Guinea-Bissau being no exception in this respect. How far has the new Nation State succeeded in fulfilling this aim? A comparative analysis of the implementation of land...

This paper serves as a brief introduction and overview for a volume that provides a set of six case studies from West Africa in order to contribute to an assessment of the benefits of growth (or the cost of a lack of growth) for poverty reduction in those countries. The first part of the volume...

Tourism and related recreation activities play a significant role in the generation of income / foreign exchange and provision of employment opportunities. Against this backdrop, this paper aims at ascertaining empirically the impact of tourism on the West African economy from 2000 – 2004. The...

Using a unique dataset collected in 59 rural Gambian villages, we study how ethnic heterogeneity is related to the structure of four economic exchange networks: land, labor, inputs and credit. We find that different measures of village-level ethnic fragmentation are mostly uncorrelated with...

A unique dataset of social and economic networks collected in 60 rural Gambian villages is used to study the ways in which households with links outside the village (that are considered as a proxy for market connections) behave in the locally available exchange networks for land, labor, input...

This paper investigates the rationality of proceeding with a common currency in West Africa by testing for symmetry and speed of adjustment to four underlying structural shocks among a pair of 66 ECOWAS economies. The findings reveal that there is relatively high degree of symmetry in the...