Sovereign wealth funds represent a large and growing pool of savings. An increasing number of these funds are owned by natural resource-exporting countries and have a variety of objectives, including intergenerational equity and macroeconomic stabilization. Traditionally, these funds have...

Can perceptions data help us understand investment climate constraints facing the private sector? Or do firms simply complain about everything? In this paper, the authors provide a picture of how firms' views on constraints differ across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the World Bank's...

We consider economic development of sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of slow convergence of productivity, both across sectors and firms within sectors. Why have 'productivity enclaves', islands of high productivity in a sea of smaller low-productivity firms, not diffused more rapidly? We...