Working Paper
South Africa’s Emerging Black Middle Class
South Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of the black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the...
Working Paper
Varieties of Capitalists?
Political scientists have generally seen two key features of African political economies—a relatively small or absent middle class, and a middle class that is unusually embedded in the state—as key explanations of the troubled political and economic...
Working Paper
Financial Markets and Governments
A survey of the changing relationship between the market for political services and the market for financial services.
Working Paper
Political economy of Nigerian power sector reform
The Nigerian power sector reform is necessitated by the chronic poor performance of the sector and has as its compass the 2005 Electric Power Sector Reform Act and the Roadmap for Power Sector Reform 2010. Implementing reform has resulted in...
Working Paper
Do Structural Reforms always Succeed?
In the last twenty years, Brazil has undergone several attempts of improving sustainable growth through stabilization programmes, and more recently, structural reforms in line with the Washington Consensus Agenda. The results, however, have been...
Working Paper
The political economy of energy innovation
This paper empirically investigates the effects of environmental policy, institutions, political orientation, and lobbying on energy innovation and finds that they significantly affect the incentives to innovate and create cleaner energy efficient...
Working Paper
Border adjustment mechanisms
This paper examines, from a multidisciplinary perspective, plausible hypotheses for implementation of border carbon adjustment mechanisms, seen as a complement to strong environmental regulation. It highlights economic, legal, and political...
Working Paper
Governing clean energy transitions in China and India
China and India will have to radically transform their electric power systems in order to decouple economic growth from unsustainable resource consumption. While the majority of transition literature has focused on the diverse socio-technical factors...
Journal Article
Stabbed in the back?
This study provides the first country-wide research evidence that an affirmative action policy may induce a backlash. I exploit the timing of the implementation of castebased electoral quotas across and within the states of India. The results show...
Journal Article
In the shadow of the city
Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest urbanising region of the world. This demographic transformation has occurred in concert with two other trends in the region, nascent democratisation and stalled decentralisation. Using the case of Lusaka, Zambia...
Working Paper
Smoothing food price trends in Nigeria
This study reviews the political economy issues surrounding the 2008 food crisis in Nigeria; the lessons learned from management of the crisis; analyses the performance of policies aimed at stabilizing prices; and proffers policy measures for...
Working Paper
Zaire after Mobutu
The recent history of Zaire presents a unique opportunity to understand and explain humanitarian emergencies. This monograph follows an inductive approach in analysing the trajectory of state-building in Zaire as a significant explanatory variable of...
Working Paper
Does Successful Governance Require Heroes? The Case of Sergio Fajardo and the City of Medellín
The city of Medellín, Colombia was a cauldron of violence with 185 homicides per 100,000 people in 2002. By 2006, this rate had declined to 32.5. Such successful transformation was termed the ‘Medellín miracle’ and credited to policies of the city’s...