We seek to understand both the incidence and the impact of the African political business cycle in the light of a literature which has argued that, with major extensions of democracy since the 1990s, the cycle has both become more intense and has made African political systems more fragile. With...

In this paper, we create the beginnings of a database on indicators of poverty and deprivation in six African countries over the last 100 years, with the intention of explaining the long-term trend of policy. We argue that an important key to those trends is provided by the decision during the...

The dramatic reduction in poverty in Uganda and Ghana in the 1990s was derived largely from the liberalisation of the export price received by a labour-intensive peasant export sector. Other African economies ought to be able to derive inspiration from this manifestation of the invisible hand,...