Several empirical studies have found that when exports are concentrated in natural resources countries experience slower rates of economic growth. Various potential channels for this relationship have been identified including Dutch disease, volatility in the terms of trade, and impacts on...

The current paper demonstrates a dichotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade, employing as case studies the two African countries, Botswana and Nigeria.Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of terms of trade on output is positive and...

Although growth has improved substantially in most African countries in recent years, poverty across the continent has fallen very little in the aggregate. There have been strong poverty reduction performances in some countries, but others exhibit higher poverty rates now than in 1990 despite...

Scholars have typically explained the developmental performance of late-late developers through the analytical lens applied to East Asian developmental states, a lens that focuses on bureaucratic capacity and the bureaucracy's relationship with businesses and with society more broadly. In...

This article seeks to explain Africa's current quot;period of unparalleled economic success,quot; following decades of economic stagnation. Using newly available data, we investigate whether international commodity price increases (our quot;metalsquot; hypothesis) or policy reforms (our...

This paper analyses a large public investment in a construction of a hydropower plant in Lesotho and its implications on the growth and debt sustainability. The paper employs an open economy dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the benefits of a large public investment through...

We study the impact of the TseTse fly—which is unique to Africa and transmits an epidemic disease harmful to humans and lethal to livestock—on modern financial development in Africa. Exploiting newly georeferenced firm data across the world, we discover that firms in regions that met the...

We examine the impact of resource windfall on the standard of living both in the short-run and long-run, using a sample of 130 countries, 1963-2007. Then, we systematically investigate the effect of resource windfall on welfare in three different groups of countries: We find that in the...

The political resource curse is the idea that natural resources can lead to the deterioration of public policies through corruption and rent-seeking by those closest to political power. One prominent consequence is the emergence of conflict. This paper takes this theory to the data for the case...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...