This paper conceptualises foreign aid as a geopolitical form of rent in order to help distinguish the conditions under which aid is detrimental to sustained economic recovery from those where it is beneficial. Foreign aid shares with natural resource rent and contrived (i.e., government...

The impact of globalization on poverty is a matter of keen debate but empirical work in this area has been dominated by cross-country regressions. This paper attempts to link the more macro impacts of globalization, particularly as manifested through the impact on employment, with the micro...

Neopatrimonialism is a concept that has predominately been applied to describe governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, though, it has also been used to describe states from other world regions. However, scholars have rarely attempted to systematically compare neopatrimonial rule in different...

This paper presents results from a randomized field experiment to test for the importance of limited commitment (due to incomplete contract enforceability) in explaining intra-household risk sharing arrangements in Kenya. The experiment followed 142 daily income earners and their spouses for 8...

This paper presents results from a field experiment designed to test whether savings constraints prevent the self-employed from increasing the size of their businesses. We opened interest-free savings accounts in a local village bank in rural Kenya for a randomly selected sample of poor daily...

In this paper we examine the Marshall-Lerner (ML) condition for the Kenyan economy. In particular, we use quarterly data on the log of real exchange rates, export-import ratio and relative (US) income for the time period 1996q1 - 2011q4, and employ techniques based on the concept of long memory...

The study uses Transaction Costs Economics Theory and Supply Chain Management frameworks to investigate determinants of coordination and supply chain performance in the Kenyan milk supply chains. The transactions investigated are between milk producers and buyer customers, between milk retailers...

Although the need for adaptation to climate variability and change is increasingly recognized, identifying and implementing adaptation options on the ground still presents a challenge. Especially for Africa, which is regarded as being particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate variability...

This paper evaluates Kenya's food price crisis over 2002 - 11 using a political economy approach. Kenya's food prices have been high and volatile relative to world food prices. Moreover, domestic food markets are highly integrated while about 30 per cent of the changes in world market prices are...

Since the famous ILO report on the informal sector in Kenya was published in 1972 the smallscale enterprises have been recognised to play an important role in the Kenyan economy as in other African countries. However, although often more than half of all the small enterprises are traders. Most...