The benefit of health care comes not just from the ability of health care providers to produce health but from their motivation to do so as well. The fact that traditional healers in Africa are paid on the basis of health outcomes not services provided changes the incentives they face compared...

In African health care the "miracle of the market" has not occurred. Patients exhibit willingness to pay for quality health care and yet good private practitioners are unable to sell their services. Simultaneously nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are running successful health facilities for...

The effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on fertility in Africa remains ill understood. To align the contrasting findings of recent empirical research, we develop a portfolio model that captures the potential trade-off between "quantity" and "quality" of offspring. According to this theoretical...

Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa.  The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities.  There...

This paper investigates the effects of religion on a broad set of development outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. We regroup these outcomes into three broad categories, namely, development process outcomes (growth, investment, conflict, and government quality), institutional outcomes (property...

The issue of foreign aid dependency in African countries remains controversial among policy makers. So far, there is no consensus on aid effectiveness and the resulting policy prescriptions have been conflicting. The Euro zone which provides the bulk of foreign aid to developing countries, is...

As at today, it is an indisputable fact that the climate is changing and there is a scientific consensus that the world is becoming a warmer place principally attributable to human activities. Regrettably, the physical impacts of future climate change on humans and the environment will include...

This paper assesses improved maize adoption in Malawi and examines the link between adoption and household welfare using a three-year household panel data. The distributional effect of maize technology adoption is also investigated by looking at impacts across wealth and gender groups. We...

This paper critically reviews the impact of globalization on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since the early 1980s. The large gains expected from opening up to international economic forces have, to date, been limited, and there have been significant adverse consequences. Foreign direct investment in...

The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers find that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results,...