Electoral competition is a democratic mechanism to guarantee high governmental performance. In reality, however, it often leads to policy failure due to Government Capture and Government Accountability. An understanding of both phenomena has to be based on voter theory and nowadays the...

Apart from the computational time and expenses of the CGE model, the discussion of elasticity parameter estimation and various closure rules as well as the difficulty of combining the results with other analysis approaches always poses obstacles ahead of us, therefore we are motivated to apply...

Using a randomized experiment in Mali, this study investigates whether Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) targeted to men and intended to reduce poverty and food insecurity impact children's schooling. Although the school-aged children are not the primary target of the program, we look to see if...

A predominantly agrarian country where land is one of the most important productive assets, land reform remains one of the most important but contentious policy issues in Sierra Leone. Despite several failed attempts to reform the country's current land property rights and administrative...

Policy making in Sub-Saharan Africa commonly assume that food and nutrition security programs that target food insecure households would most likely impact on malnourished individuals. This is despite the compelling evidence from elsewhere in the developing world that show a food distribution...

In this paper, the mechanisms of climate change impacts on the incidence of civil conflict are tested separately in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) compared to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for the period 1981 to 2015. We draw several conclusions: (i) Climate has a significant impact on...

This paper provides an analysis of the impact of extraordinary climate shocks on the incidence of civil conflict using cross-country panel data from Africa and the Middle East (1981 to 2015). We find that: (i) The estimated impact of climate shocks (mainly temperature effect) on economic growth...

Electoral competition is considered a control mechanism to guarantee a good performance of the government. However, in real life it often leads to a distorted policy implementation due to Government Capture and low Government Accountability. Therefore, the analysis of voter behavior is a key...

In democratic systems, elections are considered a mechanism to ensure that efficient policies seeking the wellbeing of the population are implemented by the government, although the reality often reflects the opposite. Governments usually act inefficiently due to problems of government...

Even in countries with well functioning democracies, not all people with the right to vote in a presidential election decide to cast a vote. In order to study the importance of abstention in presidential elections in Africa and Latin America, data from Senegal and Honduras was analyzed. These...