There is a tight historical connection between endemic labour scarcity and the rise of coercive labour market institutions in former African colonies. This paper explores how mining companies in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia secured scarce supplies of African labour, by combining...

After decades of decline, African higher education is now arguably in a new era of revival. With the prevalence of knowledge economy discourse, national governments in Africa and their development partners have increasingly aligned higher education with poverty reduction plans and strategies....

Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or...

Why are some countries in sub-Saharan Africa more prone to outbreaks of urban protests than others? Drawing together insights from the contentious politics and conflict studies literatures I develop an empirical model of protest incidence comprised of basic demographic, political and economic...

Over three decades after market-oriented structural reforms, termed "Washington consensus" policies, were first implemented, we revisit the evidence on policy adoption and the effects of these policies on socio-economic performance in sub-Saharan African countries. We focus on three key...

Growth improved substantially in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since 1990, but poverty in SSA as a whole has fallen by about a third, compared to by half or more in other developing regions. While some countries have had little or no success in reducing poverty, many have had...

Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or...

Based on data out of the 1970s, the "Heyneman-Loxley Effect" proposed that in developing countries, school characteristics were more important than family socioeconomic status in determining school achievement. In this paper, I reassess these findings using 2000s data on 14 sub-Saharan African...

While youth issues are subject of growing attention in the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region, data for indicators relating specifically to youth employment remain scarce in most SSA countries. There is therefore limited empirical basis for formulating policies and programmes promoting youth...