While it is generally recognized that electoral competition can have a major influence on public spending decisions, there has been little effort to consider whether the move to multiparty elections in African countries in recent years has led to a redistribution of public expenditures between...

Corruption in customs administrations is a major problem in many African countries. Data from the period 1990-96 are used to examine several hypotheses concerning the determinants of customs fraud in Senegal and Mali. Statistical tests using product-by-product data support the widely held view...

The returns to education remain a central concern for development policy. In developed countries there is evidence that the returns to education have been rising. Evidence for changes over this period for developing countries is limited. In this paper we use data from Kenya and Tanzania to...

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...

Contemporary policy debates on the macroeconomics of aid often concentrate on short-run Dutch disease effects, ignoring the possible supply model of aid and public expenditure in which public infrastructure capital generates an inter-temporal productivity spill over for both tradable and...

In many developing countries, the beneficiaries of transfer programmes are determined by community-based processes, based on some general targeting rules related to needs.  This opens the door for local social and political processes to impact on who gets access.  Despite increasingly large...

Following the 2007 disputed Kenyan Presidential election unprecedented levels of violence erupted across the country adding to the history of troubled elections in Africa.  This paper offers quantitative and qualitative evidence on the incidence, impacts and issues that triggered electoral...