The decline, or stagnation, in broad-based social expenditure, so crucial to the well being of mother and child, occurs because of various reasons. First, the government may derive less utility from this category of expenditure, compared to spending on its political support group, the military...

The paper examines two issues associated with aid and fiscal policy. First, how best the conditionality behind foreign aid, sometimes non-economic, is complied with in a principal-agent framework. In a multiple task and multiple principal framework, principals are better off cooperating and...

This paper reviews recent research dealing with the relationships between economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. This generally fails to find any systematic pattern of change in income distribution during recent decades. Neither does it find any systematic link from fast growth to...

This paper examines some of the issues associated with the aid donor process arising from the theory of agency or principal-agent models and endogenous policy determination. The principals may be viewed as legislators and the agents as the aid agency. In addition to adverse selection and moral...

Support for entrepreneurship is widely seen as a mechanism to facilitate prosperity and peace in a growing number of post-conflict states. In this paper I critically evaluate this view. I argue that entrepreneurship is a ubiquitous quality in post-conflict states but not necessarily always for...

Food-for-work (FFW) programmes have been widely heralded as a means of providing self-targeting transfers coupled with investment in public goods. This paper reviews the changing context that has sparked such interest in FFW, the simple theory that makes it so conceptually appealing, and...

This paper examines strategies developed by Mondragón Co-operative Corporation in the Basque Region of Spain, and La Lega co-operative network in Italy, to mitigate disadvantages of the typical co-operative organizational structure and market position but without losing its critical advantages...

This paper proposes a microeconomic decomposition of the evolution of income inequality in Côte d'Ivoire in the 1990s, allowing the in-depth analysis of simultaneous contributions of four types of phenomena to the evolution of the distribution of income: a change in the remuneration rates of...

This study traces the interactions between economic growth, income inequality and consumption poverty in a sample of African countries during the 1990s. It draws on the much-improved household data sets now available in the region. It finds that experiences have varied: some countries have seen...

In economic literature insurance networks are often treated as exogenous institutions. Frequently, the assumption is made that some clearly identifiable group (e.g. ‘the whole village’ or ‘the extended family’) constitutes an insurance network. Still, theory suggests that the formation...