Africa is at a critical inflection point. After decades of disappointing performance a combination of sound macro policies and a commodity price bonanza has led to a dramatic and long overdue surge in African growth rates and concomitant improvement in social indicators. This impressive...

This paper reviews the experiences of a few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that have succeeded in attracting fairly large amounts of foreign investment. The review indicates that sustained efforts to promote political and macroeconomic stability and implement essential structural reforms have...

Based on the experience of selected countries, this paper offers a critical presentation of the development of the microfinance sector in Africa. The paper supports the view that microfinance institutions, especially those engaged in full financial intermediation, complement effectively the...

Recently, there has been a revival of interest in multi-agent simulation techniques for exploring the nature of language change. However, a lack of appropriate validation of simulation experiments against real language data often calls into question the general applicability of these methods in...

This paper analyzes the factors affecting economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa, using data for 1981–97. The results indicate that per capita real GDP growth is positively influenced by economic policies that raise the ratio of private investment to GDP, promote human capital development,...

In this work, we attempt to capture patterns of co-occurrence across vowel systems and at the same time figure out the nature of the force leading to the emergence of such patterns. For this purpose, we define a weighted network where the vowels are the nodes and an edge between two nodes (read...

Africa is the world’s poorest continent, but amid all the bad news, there is hope for change. This pamphlet examines the lessons to be learned from some of the more successful economies south of the Sahara, and discusses a policy framework to promote sustainable economic growth and reduce...