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...
This paper evaluates transformative policy innovations with respect to security and taxation in the three main Colombian cities: Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. In the first two, such policies were associated with huge success. Elsewhere we (Gutiérrez et...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Electoral coalitions are becoming increasingly popular among opposition parties in Africa because they offer many advantages with respect to reducing party fragmentation and increasing incumbent turnovers. At the same time, however, they are often...
This study shows that China’s post-1949 state-led industrialization has closely followed an underlying path that began in the late nineteenth century. It was initiated by pressing national defence needs and has since been motivated by the same and...
New research for UNU-WIDER explores the differences between revolutionary mass mobilizations in democracies versus dictatorships. Evidence from...
Measuring the effectiveness of local government in Ghana is hampered by incomplete records, but despite that there are still visible patterns, write...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A survey of the changing relationship between the market for political services and the market for financial services.
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...
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Indonesia and South Africa are both trying address energy poverty through subsidized energy provision. South Africa has implemented one of the largest electrification programmes in the world, and 80 per cent of the population now have access to the...
Technological latecomer countries face a dilemma, they need to pursue pro-active industrial policies to compensate for manifold disadvantages vis-à-vis established competitors, but at the same time, due to neopatrimonial politics and capacity...
To predict economic success and failure, academics and policymakers alike are interested in the differences in institutional structures across natural resource-based economies. This paper uses a political economy framework to examine the effect of...
Part of Journal Special Issue Sustainability of External Development Finance
In 2015 the Government of Uganda agreed to start rolling out a social pension programme, and increasing its own contribution to it. This was driven by the highly politicized efforts of a transnational policy coalition, led by international donors and...
Part of Journal Special Issue Developing Countries in the WTO Regime
Part of Journal Special Issue Impact of the Liberalization of the Exchange Rate and Financial Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa
Despite the widespread use of paired comparisons, we lack clear guidance about how to use this research strategy in practice, particularly in case selection. The literature tends to assume that cases are systematically selected from a known...
Part of Journal Special Issue Urban Governance and Service Delivery in sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Urban Governance and Service Delivery in sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Explaining Violent Conflict
External validity is a major challenge for experimental research. I offer a new perspective on this challenge, drawing on work on case studies and causal inference – the sort of material regularly covered in introductory methods courses in political...
Part of Book Pathways to Industrialization in the Twenty-First Century
What makes elites developmental instead of predatory? We argue that Mozambique’s elite was developmental at independence 35 years ago. With pressure and encouragement from international forces, it became predatory. It has now partly returned to its...
This paper discusses the issue of taxation and redistribution in economies dominated by Elites with limited state capacity. Within a simple aggregate framework, we discuss the political economy incentives of Elites to tax, redistribute and increase...
Particular sets of institutions, once they become established in a society, have a strong tendency to persist. In this paper I argue that understanding how elites form and reproduce is key to understanding the persistence of institutions over time. I...
Rapid economic development in China in the post-1978 era has been considered 'intriguing' and 'puzzling' since it occurred under the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party – the fusion of politics and economics is supposed to be a powerful...
This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society development under communism and the political, economic and institutional change and transformation after 1989. We collected a unique dataset on nature and intensity of...
The Mexican land reform, one of the most sweeping in the world, proceeded in two steps: it granted peasants highly incomplete property rights on more than half of the Mexican territory starting in 1914, creating strong economic and political...
As elsewhere, the Colombian private sector has been accused of promoting or profiting from violence in the country. However, the private sector’s role in the armed conflict and the impact of conflict on entrepreneurial activity vary, as reflected by...
The class and social structure of developing nations has undergone profound transformation in recent decades as each nation has incorporated into an increasingly integrated global production and financial system. National elites have experienced a...
What explains the divergent political paths that the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have followed since the fall of the Berlin Wall? While some appear today to be consolidated democracies, others have all the...
Drawing on insights from Latin America, this paper examines the factors that contributed to the use of populist strategies by political parties during recent presidential elections in Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia. Specifically, the paper argues...
Dr Miguel Niño-Zarazúa explores the complex effects of clientelism on economic development, state capacity, and governance, emphasising the need for...
This paper examines the political economy of Rwanda’s Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme, concluding that strong government commitment to the programme has been shaped by the specific characteristics of the political settlement that was established...
This paper examines some of the issues associated with the aid donor process arising from the theory of agency or principal-agent models and endogenous policy determination. The principals may be viewed as legislators and the agents as the aid agency...
We provide a theory of political clientelism, which explains sources and determinants of political clientelism, the relationship between clientelism and elite capture, and their respective consequences for allocation of public services, welfare, and...
The study focuses on the period 2004–09 during which Egypt experienced food crisis. The political economy context on how the government responded to the crisis is analysed while pinpointing to what extent there was a pass-through effect from...
Mandated political representation over the last twenty years has had a different impact on the reporting of crime by the low castes than what is observed for the reporting of crime by women. I exploit the timing of the implementation of mandated...
Institutions are altered by conflict, depending on the scale, duration and type of war. At one extreme, formal political, social and economic institutions may be completely destroyed (e.g. Somalia), while the importance and type of informal...
This paper analyses a number of the challenges confronting developing countries seeking to use the WTO Doha negotiations to promote their economic growth and performance. A precondition for success is to have clear objectives and to take a pro-active...
This paper studies state failure and governance in two conflict-states in the Middle East: Iraq and Somalia. Iraq is currently undergoing a social experiment under which a new form of government is being constructed after the passage of autocratic...
The concepts vulnerability, resilience and community are widely used and abused in the literature on natural hazards and disaster risk reduction. This paper seeks to bring greater rigour in their use. In particular, vulnerability must be understood...
This paper investigates the institutional reason underlying the change in the trajectory of economic growth in post-reform China, and argues that the trajectory of growth was much more normal during the period of 1978-89 than in the post-1989 era. In...
Countries compete with one another for funds distributed by nongovernment organizations (NGOs). We examine the competition over poverty and governance conducted by a NGO in the allocation of its funds among potential recipient countries. The NGO in...
Part of Book Latin American Urban Development into the 21st Century
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Book Economies in Transition
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Book Pathways to Industrialization in the Twenty-First Century
Part of Journal Special Issue Land and Property Rights
Part of Book Food Price Policy in an Era of Market Instability
21 February 2014 Rachel M. Gisselquist Earlier this month, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a scathing critique of the role of...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid Allocations and Development Financing
Part of Book The WTO, Developing Countries and the Doha Development Agenda
Rachel M. Gisselquist Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. The...
Part of Book Financial Openness and National Autonomy
Tony Addison This month saw the visit of Kaushik Basu, the World Bank’s new Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics, to...
Senegal's 2012 presidential and legislative elections reaffirmed the country's longstanding reputation as one of Africa's most stable democracies. The elections also represented a critical juncture for the country's party system, demonstrated by the...
In a region where democratization has led to a proliferation of opposition parties, pre-electoral coalitions represent an obvious means by which to reduce excessive party fragmentation in Africa. However, this article examines whether such coalitions...
Part of Book Social Provision in Low-Income Countries
Join the network
