At the academic level and in political practice, participatory and evidence-based political processes are increasingly recognized as mechanisms that guarantee more efficient political decisionmaking. However, no theoretical framework that allows a clear definition of participatory and...

Apart from the computational time and expenses of the CGE model, the discussion of elasticity parameter estimation and various closure rules as well as the difficulty of combining the results with other analysis approaches always poses obstacles ahead of us, therefore we are motivated to apply...

Electoral competition is a democratic mechanism to guarantee high governmental performance. In reality, however, it often leads to policy failure due to Government Capture and Government Accountability. An understanding of both phenomena has to be based on voter theory and nowadays the...

There is a broad agreement that sustainable and pro-poor growth is the only successful strategy to reduce poverty. However, putting Pro-Poor-Growth (PPG) into operation is a complex task. A prominent debate concerns the relative importance of agriculture versus non-agricultural sectors in...

When a new technology is introduced to farmers, not only do individual and household factors such as risk attitudes, wealth and resource endowments affect a farm household’s likelihood of technology adoption but probably more importantly, social capital structures also appear to matter. In...

A predominantly agrarian country where land is one of the most important productive assets, land reform remains one of the most important but contentious policy issues in Sierra Leone. Despite several failed attempts to reform the country's current land property rights and administrative...