Conventional wisdom about US foreign policy toward Africa contains two popular assumptions. First, Democrats are widely considered the party most inclined to care about Africa and the most willing to spend resources on assistance to the continent. Second, the end of the Cold War was widely...

The British proposal to create an International Finance Facility in order to 'frontload' $50 billion in aid per year until 2015 has generated a lot of attention and will likely be a major topic at the G8 meeting this July. But the IFF has also been shrouded in confusion and misconceptions. This...

The British proposal to create an International Finance Facility in order to 'frontload' $50 billion in aid per year until 2015 has generated a lot of attention and will likely be a major topic at the G8 meeting this July. But the IFF has also been shrouded in confusion and misconceptions. This...

From the recent G8 Summit to UN declarations, calls for a Big Push in official development assistance by OECD countries are becoming more frequent and pressing. Although there may be a consensus among the donor community to increase giving, what impact will this new aid have on recipient...

Zimbabwe is a country on the edge. It may technically be at peace, but it is suffering war-like trauma to its polity and economy. The international community will soon likely confront the challenge of assisting the country's difficult transition from a bleak period of economic collapse and...

A number of proposals today support a substantial increase in foreign aid levels to sub-Saharan Africa even though this region already receives a historically unprecedented volume of aid. This essay reviews the evidence regarding the potentially negative effects of aid dependence on state...

In this paper, we apply a novel analytical technique—k-means clustering—to understand the relationship between the growth of firms and the availability of power in sub-Saharan Africa. We develop a classification of firms and show how firm clusters are distributed across industries and...

The globalization of financial markets has led to an impressive rise of private commercial investment in emerging markets since 1990. This rise has been driven partly by the growth of equity investment funds - collective investment schemes where individual investors contribute to multiple...

The British proposal to create an International Finance Facility in order to quot;frontloadquot; $50 billion in aid per year until 2015 has generated a lot of attention and will likely be a major topic at the G8 meeting this July. But the IFF has also been shrouded in confusion and...