An ethnographic approach is applied to Cameroon customs in order to explore the role and the capacity of the bureaucratic elites to reform their institution. Fighting against corruption has led to the extraction and circulation of legal ‘collective money’ that fuels internal funds. This...

There has been a growing recognition among scholars that politics matters in the distribution of resources in society. However, attempts to use a political economy ‘lens’ with which to explore causes of poverty and strategies for poverty alleviation have largely ignored elites. By failing to...

The paper documents the economic development strategies pursued by the Dominican Republic. The study argues that the country’s success results from the implementation of a three-pronged economic development strategy. The first prong relates to diversifying production and the second to...

This paper shows how an elite cadre of public sector officials played a key role in the success of administrative reforms in Brazil’s state tax administration bureaus in the 1990s. The success of the reforms strengthened public sector bureaucracies and institutions at all government levels,...

While economic growth generally reduces income poverty, there are pronounced differences in the strength of this relationship across countries. Typical explanations for this variation include measurement errors in growth-poverty accounting and countries’ different compositions of economic...

The paper discusses views on China and India as country role models. In so doing the article recounts the economic and political reforms pursued by the two countries. The paper also outlines the outstanding reforms and the bottlenecks that could jeopardize economic performance and development...

Aid providers frequently link supporting small firms to job creation. Small firms create about half of new jobs in Africa, but they also have higher failure rates. Ignoring firm exit exaggerates net employment growth. Using panel data for Ethiopia, we fin

Climate change is an issue that requires global attention and co-operation. As climate science develops an understanding of changes to the future climate state, policy makers and engineering project planners beg to know what claims can be made on the subj

In a recent article, Nowak-Lehmann, Dreher, Herzer, Klasen, and Mart.nez-Zarzoso (2012) (henceforth NDHKM) conclude that foreign aid has not had a significant effect on income, based on evidence from panel data potentially covering 131 countries over the

Aid co-ordination is a constant theme of discussion among national and international aid agencies in their search for more effectiveness and efficiency in delivering development assistance. This paper seeks to clarify some of the arguments currently made