Much African land currently has low productivity and has attracted investors purchasing (or leasing) land as a speculative option on higher future prices or productivity. If land deals are to be beneficial they need to induce productivity enhancing investments. Some of these will be publicly...

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis asserts that pollution levels rises as a country develops, but reaches a certain threshold where pollution begins to fall with increasing income. In EKC analysis, the relationship between environmental degradation and income is usually expressed...

Much African land currently has low productivity and has attracted investors leasing land as a speculative option on higher future prices or productivity. To be beneficial land deals need to induce productivity enhancing investments. Some of these will be publicly provided (infrastructure,...

The global food price crisis of 2007/08 raised fears about the impacts of higher and more volatile food prices for the poor in Zambia. Like in the past, the implementation of the strategies to deal with the rising food prices, especially for the staple crop maize were delayed due to ineffective...

Rapid urbanization is a fact of live even in the least developed countries (LDCs) where the lion’s share of the population presently lives in rural areas and will continue to do so for decades to come. At the turn of the millennium 75% of the LDCs’ population still lived in rural areas and...

The CuveWaters project relates the alignment and implementation of innovative water technologies to an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in the Cuvelai-Etosha-Basin, which lies in Central Northern Namibia. The aim here is to improve inhabitants’ living conditions by means of...

This paper addresses two important economic issues for Africa: the contribution of national borders and ethnicity to market segmentation and integration between and within countries. Market pair regression analysis provides evidence of higher conditional price dispersion for both a grain and a...

In most nations around the world wildlife are owned and managed by the State. However, in the past 30 years Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa have altered their legal regimes to give full control over the use of wildlife to the private owners of the land on which the wildlife are located....

This paper documents and analyses the predominance of informal employment in Africa and shows that lack of demand for labour rather than worker characteristics is the main reason for pervasive underemployment. Integration into the global economy and exports of labour-intensive products are vital...

Africa's improved growth performance over the last 15 years provides an opportunity for the continent to transit from recovery to structural transformation. This paper reviews the evolution of development theory and practice, the role of agriculture therein, and the pace of structural...