The social sciences have long been invested in answering the question of whether and how different configurations of de facto political power affect economic, political and social development. So far, however, a lack of adequate data has made it difficult to test the validity of contending...

When are developing countries able to initiate periods of rapid growth and why have so few been able to sustain growth over decades? This book provides a novel conceptual framework built from a political economy of business-government relations and applies it to nine countries across Africa and...

African cities are critical to the continent’s prospects of achieving environmentally sustainable forms of prosperity and poverty reduction. Can Africa cities help generate processes of national economic development? Can they be transformed in ways that secure more inclusive and sustainable...

A frontier challenge for development strategy is to move beyond prescribing optimal economic policies, and instead - taking a broad view of the interactions between economic, political and social constraints and dynamics - to identify entry points capable of breaking a low-growth logjam, and...

This paper lays out a comparative framework for assessing the potential, limitations and challenges of a variety of emerging institutional innovations in globalized regulation. The framework highlights two dimensions of effectiveness-the comprehensiveness of coverage, and the credibility of the...

Many low-income countries contend with a governance syndrome characterized by a difficult combination of seeming openness, weak institutions, and strong inter-elite contestation for power and resources. In such countries, neither broad-based policy nor public management reforms are likely to be...