In the new millennium, the Western aid effort towards Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a … celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey … contrasts the predominant "transformational" approach (West saves Africa) to occasional swings to a "marginal" approach (West …

Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data … exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves …

Using country- and region-level data, I investigate the effect of HIV/AIDS on fertility in Africa during 1985 …

We assess Africa's prospects for enjoying a demographic dividend. While fertility rates and dependency ratios in Africa … Northern America. This projection suggests Africa has considerable potential to enjoy a demographic dividend. Whether and when … these areas, coordinated policies will likely be most effective in generating the momentum needed to pull Africa's economies …

Southern Africa. We then assess to what extent these combinations apply to both countries using an empirical analysis. We find … that trade openness drives convergence and export diversification in Western Africa (which is becoming more diversified …) while convergence is instead driven by economic and political freedoms in Southern Africa (which is becoming more …