This paper examines the post-war strategies of Liberia and Sierra Leone to generate revenues from their natural resources. We document the challenges faced by the government of the two countries, contrasting measures taken to address these challenges as well as the outcomes. We complement the...

Abstract: Natural resource endowment offers great opportunities for achieving high levels of growth and development, notably via fiscal revenue mobilization throughout the entire chain of operations from exploration to production to exports. In the case of African countries, however,...

Noting that Africa's resource-rich countries have not translated their wealth into sustained economic growth and poverty reduction, this paper shows that by transferring a portion of resource-related government revenues uniformly and universally as direct payments to the population, some...

Purpose - The purposes of this paper are to review the streams of studies that link financial inclusion to small enterprise growth in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA), to identify the research gaps they provide, and to prepare an agenda for future research in the field. Design/methodology/approach - The...

Several African countries have to increase their tax revenues to finance human and economic development. General consumption taxes, such as VATs, are the preferred instrument for doing so, because they are less detrimental to growth than income taxes. To enable their use, VAT design has to be...

This paper examines a broad range of opportunities for addressing the pressing human development needs of low-income countries by using new oil, gas, and mineral discoveries. It assesses how much of an impact can be made on the funding gaps for health and education by new oil and gas revenues,...