Sub-Sahara African countries have had a checkered past when it comes to good governance and good institutions. Increasingly, economists and policy makers are recognizing the importance of good governance and institutions for economic growth and development. The New Partnership for Africa’s...

This report reviews recent trends in household access to infrastructure services and associated budgetary expenditures in Africa. It is based on a pooled database that draws upon the entire body of household surveys conducted in sub-Saharan Africa in the last 15 years.

The article discusses some of the most important reasons for the poor growth performance of most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. While high protection levels in high-income countries in Europe and North America for agricultural trade have been cited as a major impediment for the development of...

Economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa has been lagging behind. At the time of independence, a number of Sub-Saharan countries had relatively favourable development prospects and income levels comparable with those in Southeast Asian countries. Yet, many Southeast Asian countries today have...

In Sub-Saharan Africa the cost of transport faced by city dwellers, particularly the poor, tends to add to their travel and economic difficulties. Knowledge of the burden of transport expenditure in the household budget seems essential for passenger transport policy formulation in order to...

In recent years it has become clear that climate change is an inevitable process. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the expectation is that climate change will have an especially negative impact, not only a result of projected warming and rainfall deficits, but also because of the vulnerability of the...

Empirical evidence suggests that regional disparities in incomes are often very high, that these disparities do not necessarily disappear as economies grow and that these disparities are itself an important driver of growth. We use a novel approach based on multilevel modeling to decompose the...

Although linked to poverty as conditions reflecting inadequate access to resources to obtain food, issues such as hunger and food insecurity have seldom been recognized as important in urban settings. Overall, little is known about the prevalence and magnitude of hunger and food insecurity in...

For many low-income countries, there has been an extended period in which fiscal policy was not a choice, or was a choice made by authorities external to the country. For a number of them, this situation is now changing. Their own success in stabilising the economy, coupled with a shift in the...