You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The key challenge for achieving sustained development in developing countries relates to quality of domestic governance, which in turn is strongly affected by external interventions. Domestic governance includes politics, policy formulation, institution building and policy implementation. It is important for both international and domestic agents to understand how the interplay between external interventions and domestic governance affects social and economic outcomes. This volume presents a series of studies analysing the links between external interventions and domestic governance in the areas of economic, social and security policy. Key questions that are addressed here include: How do ex...
This book offers an in-depth analysis of the current state of the African economy and makes constructive suggestions about its future direction. The contributors argue that despite enduring challenges such as food security and employment creation, Africa faces a brighter future in sustainable growth provided that governance and policy- making are effectively employed to maintain peace, achieve greater regional collaboration and encourage private sector competitiveness.
The Governance Agenda is the framework that currently organizes the West’s relations with Africa. The present work is an attempt to see Governance through the lens of a contemporary, local history. The report analyzes three periods of contentious politics at local level in Tanzania and two multi-party elections. It provides a window on mismanagement in local government, it examines the intervention by national and local elites in district conflicts, and it points to the difficulties ordinary people face in holding their leaders to account. The argument of the report is that current approaches to the study of Governance overlook an essential ingredient for its potential success: namely...
Poor people in developing countries are often affected by droughts, floods, illness, crop failure, job loss, and economic downturns. Much of their energy goes into coping with these shocks and into day-to-day survival. While insurance and credit markets, combined with widespread social security, provide an important cushion against poverty in rich countries, the need for immediate survival may lock the poor into persistent poverty in developing countries.The poor in developing countries do have informal mechanisms to cope with risk and misfortune. These are based on income diversification, risk avoidance, self-insurance by saving together with family, and community-based mutual assistance. N...
Since the end of the second world war the economic gap between rich and poor countries has steadily widened. Trade, Growth and Development examines this disparity and assesses the reasons why some developing countries have been more successful than others. The book is divided into four parts: Part I examines recent developments in the theory of trade, growth and economic development; Parts II to IV present an empirical analysis of policy and performance in Latin America, Asia and Africa. As well as offering an analysis of traditional economic factors the book also emphasises the role of politics and institutions in the process of economic development.
Science and technology have long been considered key for development, problem solving and education in low-income countries, and Sweden has been at the forefront of efforts in this area, as one of the first countries to formalize research aid. This book analyses how the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries (Sarec) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) have worked to promote science in low-income countries. In doing so, the book tackles challenging questions around whose knowledges and capacities count, who sets the research agenda, how knowledge resources are distributed, and how complex donor–recipient relationships serve both to ...
Africa is a diverse continent. But is there a pattern to the diversity? Are there commonalities across the countries? And what does economics tell us about the diversity and the commonalities? The Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa is a definitive and comprehensive account of the key issues and topics affecting Africa's ability to grow and develop. It includes 53 thematic and 48 country perspectives by a veritable who's who of more than 100 leading economic analysts of Africa. The contributors include: bright new African researchers based in Africa; renowned academics from the top Universities in Africa, Europe and North America; present and past Chief Economists of the African Development Bank; present and past Chief Economists for Africa of the World Bank; present and past Chief Economists of the World Bank; African Central Bank governors and finance ministers; and four Nobel Laureates in Economics.
This is a story of the soft budget constraint. It seeks an answer to a paradox: the prevalence of the soft budget constraint in spite of the tremendous inefficiencies that it gives rise to, and its persistence in spite of reform of the system of which it is an integral part. The story aims at increasing our understanding of why the phenomenon exists. By studying the case of state in Tanzania before, during and after socialism, an explanation of the owned enterprises emergence, persistence and logic of the soft budget constraint is suggested. This introductory chapter presents an argument showing why this story is worth telling. It discusses the research topic and how the problem it presents ...
In light of the uses and misuses of history in Zimbabwean politics in recent years, this research report focuses on how versions of the country "s liberation war history have become a site of struggle over the definition of Zimbabwean national identity. As "identity politics" often do, Zimbabwean nationalism draws on a wide field of cultural symbols of identity and political discourses of inclusion and exclusion. Therefore, the report takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the issue of national identity by "mapping out" the imaginary field of Zimbabwean nationalism. This approach opens up the possibility of cross-reading the political discourses of the President and the ruling party ZANU (PF) with opposing voices such as those in the works of the author Yvonne Vera. This cross-reading shows how Vera "s novels and the political discourses participate in the struggle over Zimbabwean national identity by offering different versions of the nation "s history in the form of "patriotic history," "feminist nationalism," or narratives of difference. In this way the research report adds to our understanding of power and resistance in Zimbabwean politics of national identity.
Finally, when the country enters the second generation of reforms, such as public sector institutional reform, short-term, conditionality-based aid can once again be harmful - by reducing ownership, participation, and sustainability of the reform process."--BOOK JACKET.