This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem to...

Currently, evidence on the ‘resource curse’ yields a conundrum. While there is much crosssection evidence to support the curse hypothesis, time series analyses using vector autoregressive (VAR) models have found that commodity booms raise the growth of commodity exporters. This paper adopts...

Usage of health facilities in Ethiopia is among the lowest in the world; raising usage rates is probably critical for improving health outcomes. The government has diagnosed the principal problem as the lack of primary health facilities and is devoting a large share of the health budget to...

Civil wars dramatically reduce income. Peace might therefore be expected to generate a dividend which both the government and the private sector can spend. Paradoxically, those civil wars which are prolonged and therefore do most damage create only small instant peace dividends. Income has...

In the 1980s conditional lending for structural adjustment in developing countries moved the IMF beyond its role of macroeconomic crisis management. Fund-supported adjustment programmes have often been flawed by a lack of distributional analysis and by poor sequencing of reforms, notably...

This paper examines the contractual practices of African manufacturing firms using survey data collected in Burundi, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Descriptive statistics and econometric results are presented. They show that contractual flexibility is pervasive and that...

The paper investigates the effects of ethnic diversity on economic performance and the risk of violent conflict. Diversity has various detrimental microeconomic effects, tending to reduce public sector performance, increase patronage, and lower the level of trust among individuals. However,...