Tag Archives: Development

Should policy seek to promote small firms or large ones in Africa?

Is small beautiful when it comes to firms in poor countries? Whatever one thinks is the answer to that question the pervasiveness of small scale enterprises in countries in sub-Saharan Africa is not in dispute. In a recent CSAE discussion … Continue reading

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Why self-employed women earn less: Building a search-match model with data from Ghana

In many African labour markets, women are over-represented in sectors where earnings gaps are largest. For example, in urban Ghana, self-employed women outnumber self-employed men by a ratio of nearly 3:1, but male earnings are double female earnings in that … Continue reading

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Dust and Death: Evidence from the West African Harmattan

Environmental events can have profound health-related, social, and economic impacts. These have the potential to be particularly salient in poorer countries, where individuals have fewer strategies available for coping or adapting to shocks. A new paper by Adhvaryu et al … Continue reading

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Measuring attitudes regarding female genital mutilation through a list experiment

Female genital mutilation (FGM) or female genital cut or female circumcision includes all procedures that alter or cause injure to the female genital organs. They are mainly carried out on young girls. FGM is recognized as an extreme form of … Continue reading

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Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa: Isolating Facts from Fiction

The Causality Question Evolutionary biologists have long argued that competition over scarce natural resources is one of the key drivers of violent conflict within and across species. The competition in Africa appears to be over the revenue generated from scarce … Continue reading

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Ethics in Development Economics

On 3rd Nov we had a seminar presentation by Johannes Haushofer on a RCT in Kenya. In this experiment, some households  in villages is Western Kenya were given unconditional cash transfers of either USD 404 or USD 1525. The researchers … Continue reading

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Universal access to HIV treatment: fiscal sustainability and incentives.

Before the advent of anti-retroviral therapies in the nineties, being infected by the HIV virus was equivalent to a death sentence. Now, thanks to remarkable advances in medical research, people who are HIV+ have the possibility to considerably increase their … Continue reading

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The Burundi crisis: Local Grievances, Ethnicity, and the Economy.

When president Nkurunziza announced his intention to run for a third term, serious unrest exploded in the streets of Bujumbura. In the last three weeks, violent clashes with the police have triggered fears of a new civil war and destabilisation … Continue reading

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Poverty as a multi-dimensional and intertemporal phenomenon

Over the last few years, two major developments in the way poverty is conceptualised and measured stand out. These regard, respectively, poverty’s multi-dimensionality and its dynamic nature over time. Developing measurement techniques which appropriately capture these important aspects of poverty … Continue reading

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Affecting fertility behaviour in Zambia

Giving women control over their fertility is at the forefront of the agenda for improving the well-being of women in developing countries. This issue was explored in the Plenary Lecture at the 2015 CSAE conference, given by Nava Ashraf, an … Continue reading

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