The so-called .Arab spring. in North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011 took many political commentators by surprise. It challenged international democracy support to learn from its own limitations while potentially offering exciting new opportunities. The global momentum of...

Although recent developments greatly increased interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. Rwanda.s nation-wide land tenure regularization programme is of great interest. A discontinuity design with spatial fixed...

The paper analyses the changes in tax policy, tax/GDP ratios, tax incidence and income inequality which have taken place in Latin America during the last decade against the background of the changes observed in these variables during the liberal years of the 1980s and 1990s. The paper argues...

This paper provides an historical overview of aid flows to North Africa. It assesses the aid allocation process and argues that past aid flows to the region have been heavily influenced by donor political interests. This has reduced the effectiveness of aid which, with the exception of Tunisia,...

Scholars and policy makers believe that democracy will bring prosperity through integration into the global economy via increased international trade. This study tests two theories as to why democracies might trade more. First, political freedom may be correlated with economic freedom, thus...

This study revisits the effect of aid on the quality of institutions and examines the effects of a major source of instability, namely terms-of-trade instability, on the quality of democracy. We take advantage of previous empirical findings which explain the role of aid in mitigating the adverse...

Industrial policy has attracted considerable controversy in the development context. This paper makes a case for a pragmatic and limited approach to interventions as a means of stimulating industrialization in the context of current and future challenges facing newly industrializing economies....

The growing urbanization of poverty poses a significant challenge to governments and donors alike, particularly in Asia, which houses 60 per cent of the world.s slum dwellers. Donors have been slow to respond to the urban challenge, however, both in their funding patterns and their priorities....

The youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Today, as the region faces a growing .youth bulge. that is disproportionately burdened by un- and underemployment, capturing the votes of this demographic is becoming more important than ever before....

Unlike in the past where industrial policy was either focused on creation and growth of state-owned firms or alternatively consisted merely of broadly functional policies without consideration for firm or entrepreneurial specifics, the requirement now is that future industrial policy ought to be...