Recent development literature has placed priority on poverty reduction, and on possible growth enhancement from a more equal distribution of assets and income. At the same time, empirical work consistently shows that economic growth is no more than distribution neutral. In that context, this...

This paper takes stock of the current status of health sectors in MENA. From the narrow perspective of national aggregate indicators, as with most middle income countries, the region has seen significant achievements. Yet, health sectors face systemic challenges, and suffer from significant and...

This paper examines how ëconfluenceí and ëautonomyí, two key concepts introduced by Frisch around 1930, have disappeared in econometrics textbooks and why only some fragments of the two have survived mainstream econometrics. It relates the disappearance to the defect in the textbook position...

The close relationship between commodity future and cash prices is critical for the effectiveness of risk management and the functioning of price discovery. However, in recent years, commodity futures prices, across the board, have appeared increasingly detached from prices on physical markets....

Despite repeated policy initiatives from donors and governments, the human and economic cost of continued lack of access to safe water and sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa remains high. This paper shows that a radical reorientation of policy is needed to achieve a significant increase in...

This paper investigates the rise and fall of the IV method in macro-econometric models and its subsequent revival in micro-econometric models. The key findings are: (i) the IV method implicitly breaks the contemporaneously circular causality postulated in a simultaneousequation model (SEM) by...

This paper looks at the recent expansion of European banks in the developing countries. It argues that no specific European influence is apparent in emerging markets, other than a declining financial interest in former colonies. Actual developments in emerging markets are determined by domestic...

In social science gifts are frequently contrasted with commodities. Commodities are assumed to stand for rationality and commercial gain, in short the economic realm. Gifts are presumed to be bearers of moral obligation and social concerns, that is, to represent the non-economic realm. However,...

This paper is a comparative study of the role of agriculture in economic development in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Popular notions of economic duality and agricultural squeeze in sub-Saharan Africa are re-examined, and new explanations in terms of agrarian structures and resource...