There is a tight historical connection between endemic labour scarcity and the rise of coercive labour market institutions in former African colonies. This paper explores how mining companies in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia secured scarce supplies of African labour, by combining...

In previous papers we have considered the optimal mix of biodiversity in semi-arid rangelands, focusing on the steady state. This paper addresses the question of conservation in the optimal use of rangelands. That is, it considers the optimal trajectory of biodiversity change. There are two...

Against the background of the European Conference on African Studies (AEGIS), held in London from 30 June to 2 July 2005, where the authors hosted two panels on the ‘New roles for traditional leaders in tax collection and rural development: expectations, obstacles and conflicts’, this paper...

This paper reviews the economic, monetary and financial relations between the EU and the euro area and a set of countries in a broad set of neighbouring regions. The 80 or so countries are mostly classified as transition, emerging or developing economies and belong to four main regions: the...

Commodity prices play an important role in economic developments in most of the 24 Western and Central African (WCA) countries covered in this paper. It is confirmed that in the light of rising commodity prices between 1999 and 2005, net oil exporters recorded strong growth rates while net...

Das Papier unterzieht Studien der Weltbank über Verlauf und Ergebnis von Strukturanpassung in Subsahara Afrika einer kritischen Würdigung. Zwei zentralen Behauptungen der Bank wird widersprochen: Strukturanpassung hätte zu einem Abbau ökonomischer Renten geführt und man könne...

This paper analyzes the increased role of the domestic and multinational private sectors in economic development within SSA. The globalization process demands that private sector strategies must now be assessed by their contributions to emerging economies, as well as by company goals.

This paper deals with the question of how responsive farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are to changes in incentives. Employing Johansen's multivariate cointegration approach, it investigates for ten selected SSA countries the long-run effect of pricing policies, macroeconomic distortions, and...

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...