Using publicly available databases and drawing on a wide range of indicators, this paper reviews the institutional performance of Mozambique across seven broad categories: rule of law and judicial independence; voice and freedom of expression/association; political participation; accountability...

The global economy, dominated by the consequences of a disastrous health crisis and international tensions, needs policy support to regain its growth dynamic. To regain an inclusive and sustainable growth dynamic, structural policies of governments are needed to allow a reallocation of resources...

The South African constitution is considered progressive and transformative in intention due to its inclusion of socioeconomic rights, such as the right to education, land, food, and healthcare. However, some of these rights are qualified by the availability of resources to the state, which...

Local institutional and structural (meso) factors can play a role in mediating the returns to a macro-social policy. I focus on the Brazilian cash-transfer-programme Bolsa Familia and check how contextual features influence the returns to transfers. Building on Amartya Sen's work, I assess the...

Does democracy promote economic growth? There is still an ongoing debate over the economic implications of democracy, and this question has gained critical importance particularly in the African context, where a wave of democratization in the early 1990s coincided with the start of a new era of...

This paper develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resort to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re-election. Using a panel dataset of 51 African countries covering the period 1980 to...

In this study, we assess the inclusiveness of growth by tracking the yearly percentage change in the household consumption of individuals over different growth spells in Cameroon, Senegal, and Tanzania. With cross-sectional data, we track the consumption of groups of individuals that share...

Vietnam's industrial development since doi moi is a success, but only a partial one. This paper provides a political economy account of Vietnam's industrial growth since 1986. It shows that the key determinant of Vietnam's industrial growth lies in the relationship between the party-state and...

Industrial policy is back. Advocates for industrial policy argue that the important question is not whether such policies should be applied at all, but how to design and implement them. For the extractive industries this development poses a challenge. First, there is the argument that host...

We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...