Calls for liberalizing cash crop sectors in sub-saharan Africa have been voiced for decades. Yet, the impact of reforms remains elusive in empirical studies. This paper offers new opportunities to solve this problem by creating precise and consistent market organisation indices for 25 African...

We study the impact of transportation infrastructure on agriculture and development in colonial Ghana. Two railway lines were built between 1901 and 1923 to connect the coast to mining areas and the large hinterland city of Kumasi. This unintendedly opened vast expanses of tropical forest to...

We examine the distributional impact of major dams on cropland productivity in Africa. As our unit of analysis we use a scientifically based spatial breakdown of the continent that allows one to exactly define regions in terms of their upstream/downstream relationship at a highly disaggregated...

This article explores the role of trend shocks in explaining the specificities of business cycles in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries using the methodology introduced by Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) [Emerging Market Business Cycles: The Cycle Is the Trend Journal of Political Economy 115(1)]....

The devaluation of the CFA Francs in 1994 has highlighted the relevance of fiscal coordination in African monetary unions. After 1994, African monetary unions have adopted a fiscal rule which prescribes a permanent nil or positive budgetary balance. This article studies how this fiscal rule...

1. The Resocot Projet is a research project which brought together teams of researchers from the North and Africa, not all of which were familiar with the theoretical approach used at the outset. This project aims at developing a methodology and materials to help assess the performance of the...

This working paper contains the first results of a questionnaire that was conducted in May 2004 (May, 8-9) among 331 students of the Addis Ababa University to know their opinion about democracy and the political preferences they express through voting. The paper takes the form of the...

Planning and other territorial policies within Europe are more and more dependant upon its relations with the rest of the world. The growing international flows (migrants, trade, investments, polluting agents) interact with the European territories; moreover, the vision the Europeans have of...

Contrary to Asian countries, the agricultural sector in Africa had not benefited from the green revolution success. After a long time of disinterest in the agriculture sector in Africa, several voices arise now in favour of greater efforts towards this sector. Several studies tend to show the...

Using a rich dataset from West Africa we study the determinants of membership in rural producer organizations (RPO). We ...nd that on average it is the more fortunate members of rural society who belong in RPOs. In Senegal, the dominant criteria are land ownership. In Burkina Faso it is economic...