Purpose – Education as a weapon in the fight against conflict and violence remains widely debated in policy and academic circles. Against the background of growing political instability in Africa and the central role of the knowledge economy in 21st century development, this paper provides...

The Enhanced HIPC Initiative was launched in 1999 to reduce the NPV of poor country foreign debt to a sustainable threshold of 150 percent of their exports. This paper applies a simple growth-with-debt model to sixteen post-completion point HIPCs to assess whether or not this goal will be met by...

This paper presents a dynamic heterogeneous panel data model in which the reaction of the real exchange rate to external finance includes interactions with the measure of the trade openness, fiscal, monetary and nominal exchange rate policies of twenty-four primary-exporting Sub-Saharan African...

This paper presents evidence on the reliability of claims in the literature on microfinance institutions (MFIs) regarding the role of interest rates and institutional design in helping MFIs to realize financial self-sufficiency. It pools data from 426 institutions in 41 developing countries from...

The Enhanced HIPC Initiative was launched in 1999 to reduce the Net Present Value (NPV) of foreign debt of the world's poorest countries to a sustainable threshold of 150% of their exports. This article applies a simple growth-with-debt model to 16 post-completion-point HIPCs to assess whether...

Purpose – The Imo State Supervised Agricultural Credit Loans Board (ISACLB) has outright default rates of more than 50 percent. Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify the major characteristics of the Board's beneficiaries who completely failed to honour their repayment commitment as...

This article assesses the likelihood and costs of halving the poverty headcount ratio by 2015 from its 1990 levels in sixteen post-HIPC-MDRI countries. An optimistic pro-poor growth scenario indicates that, on average, they will attain this goal 2 years before the end date. An estimated annual...

In the current efforts of harmonizing the standards and enforcement of IPRs protection worldwide, this paper explores software piracy trajectories and dynamics in Africa. Using a battery of estimation techniques that ignore as well as integrate short-run disturbances in time-dynamic fashion, we...