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Facing a catastrophe in terms of human lives, resource over-exploitation, poverty, pollution, external domination, cultural emargination, Africa is giving rise to new democracies and self-rules, trying to leverage on its young population to dignity and modernity.
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Essay: Microfinance in Ghana: an overview (2007) A sound example of vibrant and innovative economy,
Ghana offers a great institutional richness of microfinance institutions,
as explained in this paper. Outlining the challenges, a Central
Bank insider calls for further improvements in the organization
of the sector.
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UN
statistical report on Africa (January 2008)
The Millennium Development Goals: the 2006 report on achievements and failures The fight agains poverty, diseases, lack of education and other key goals declared by the United Nations. Essay: Realising their rights? Self-assessed
community needs in 30 settlements in South Africa (2007) Based on a innovative field survey, the needs in poor rural and urban areas have been assessed leading to specific proposals of improvement. This methodology can be repeated in other contexts. Climate change in Africa Africa is seen by experts as particularly vulnerable to climate change. The size of its land mass means that in the middle of the continent, overall rises in temperature will be up to double the global rise, with increased risk of extreme droughts, floods and outbreaks of diseases.
Essay:
Trade at risk - a strategy for South Africa Precautionary, mitigation and adaptation measures for South Africa to trade collapse risk.
Economic
data: External funds to overall African development Comparative data of different capital flows (FDI, Net official development assistance, private remittances, long-term debt) across time and macro-regions. Essay: 2004 Peace Nobel Prize - Lecture by Wangari Maathai "When the environment is destroyed, plundered
or mismanaged, we undermine our quality of life and that of future
generations. Together, we have planted over 30 million trees that
provide fuel, food, shelter, and
income to support their children’s education and household
needs. The activity also creates employment
and improves soils and watersheds. Through their involvement, women
gain some degree of power over their lives, especially their social
and economic position and relevance in the family. This work
continues. Initially, the work was difficult because historically our people have been persuaded to believe that because they are poor, they lack not only capital, but also knowledge and skills to address their challenges. Instead they are conditioned to believe that solutions to their problems must come from ‘outside’." Her organization: The Green Belt Movement (GBM) is a grassroots non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Kenya that focuses on environmental conservation, community development and capacity building.
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Essay:
Economic
development in Africa: Trade Performance and Commodity Dependence UNCTAD report on the difficulties for trade to work for the poor. Economic
data: Input-output matrix
of African emigration of high skilled workers (53 African countries
x 9 receiving countries)
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Essay:
UN
report on Africa The economic report on Africa development and poverty reduction.
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Essay: Nepad action plans: a summary NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa's Development) is a comprehensive socio-economic renewal programme that is anchored on the three interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development - economic development, social development and environmental protection. NEPAD’s primary objectives are to accelerate eradication of poverty and to place African countries, both individually and collectively, on a path to high economic growth and sustainable development. The goals that the African countries seek to achieve through NEPAD are the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals. The NEPAD process deepens ownership by African countries of their development agenda, and also provides a framework for actions at national and regional levels. An overview of Nepad action plans
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Essay: The EU strategy for Africa Region-specific and country-specific partnership agreements between EU and Africa
Essay: A strategy for Africa and how to fund it 2005 comprehensive report of the UK Commision for Africa. How to finance African development strategy
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Essay: African peer-review mechanism This mechanism, launched by the Nepad (New Partnership for Africa's Development) aims to foster the adoption of appropriate policies, laws, standards, practices, that lead to political stability, high economic growth, sustainable development, sub-regional and continental integration. Guidelines and questionnaire for countries
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Essay: Environment initiative of the Nepad The New Partnership for Africa's Development presents its action plan on environment protection. Essay: Nepad Strategy for African agriculture The Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development
Programme (CAADP) has been endorsed by the African Heads of State
and Government as a framework for the restoration of agriculture
growth, food security, and rural development in Africa. The primary
CAADP goal is agriculture-led
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Essay: Emerging from the past: a declaration of 1993 on Africa's future to be "Towards the 21st Century" - UN Tokyo international conference on African development
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Essay: Assessing African integration The opinion by United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.
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Economic
data: An overall outlook of Africa
in the '90s
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Essay: Nepad: an annotated critique For you to gather a wider spectrum of opinions, we republish a critique of Nepad, without any comment by the EWI.
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Economic data: Attitudes towards democracy, economic and social issues: microdata from African countries at the Afrobarometer Micro-data about
the attitude towards democracy in South Africa
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Economic
data: AIDS / HIV in Africa: a time-series
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Essay:
Evaluating
the benefits from liberalization in agriculture: are standard Walrasian
models relevant? Liberalisation, preventing price stabilisation policies, results in more instability, and a decrease in welfare, as it is numerically demonstrated in both a partial equilibrium model of the world sugar industry and a GTAP-style general equilibrium model of the world economy. For more information about agriculture research and the authors' activities for Africa and other development areas, see the pages from CIRAD and CEPED.
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Essay: Theoretical foundations of partnerships for economic development Robert Axelrod, outstanding scholar of (bounded-rational) game-theory, presents in plain English, some key factors in partnerships for development.
Essay: Foreign direct investment to Africa An Africa-based think tank review the current FDI policy in Africa, its effects and proposes new approaches. Economic data: Foreign direct investment in Africa by country and sector How is Africa considered by foreign investors? Where do they locate their FDI? In which sector? Economic data: FDI from African investors This paper pulls together what is known about African outward FDI, distinguishing between intra Africa outward FDI and African outward FDI to outside the region.
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data: Long-term macroeconomic data for 136 African and non-African
countries
The most user-friendly distribution of the main international database on GDP components (consumption, investment, public expenditure and net exports) for 136 countries and 42 years. Excellent for international comparisons, long-term growth enquiries and business cycle analysis, since it provides real values at constant prices comparable over time and countries.
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Aging population: the share of over
60 across in Africa and beyond The
diffusion of contraceptive methods in Africa and beyond (160 countries)
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Economic data: The presence and employment of Small and Medium Enterprises in Africa
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data: Exports, imports,
trade balances for 181 African and non-African countries - a time-series
Absolute figures, shares in world trade, rankings. Economic data:
Products exported and imported by African and non-African
countries A huge database of about 1 million records.
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Economic data: Origins and destinations in world trade - Trade flows over time
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Essay: Oil as a curse? The case of Nigeria Current levels of misery in the Nigerian population
are such that you could not tell Nigeria is been earning so much,
thanks to the 2004 high prices of oil. If this third Oil boom leaves
any legacy, seems it will be one of struggle to rein in public
sector expenditure, which has ballooned in the meanwhile, with
consequences of structural distortions that are likely to negatively
affect economic growth.
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Essay: A solution for the "national resource curse": should we distribute oil revenues to the citizens directly instead that to governments? Countries with an abundance of natural resources
have on average lower economic growth than resource-poor countries.
They also have more poverty and
are more likely to suffer from violent conflict. These negative
outcomes in resource-rich countries are called the ‘curse
of natural resources.’ Dr. Martin
E. Sandbu proposes a policy of revenue distributions from taxable
resources to individuals as a way of addressing the curse. Instead
of paying resource rents in to the government treasury, they would
be distributed equally to all indviduals, but the government would
then be allowed to tax it back.
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Debate site: SARDC Research and information on Southern Africa and the Southern African Development Community (SADC)
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data: 2004 Labour market levels
and trends in Africa: employment
and unemployment in the general
population, the youth, the women
MS Excel [1200 KB]
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Economic data: 93 Food products prices in 198 African and non-African countries (1985-2001) The price of sugar, milk, meat and many more foodstuffs. Ideal to compare price structures over countries and time. By transforming these local-currency data in dollars, you can test the "one price law", according to which any good has the same price worldwide, after taken into account nominal exchange rates. Comparing with world wages, you get the real purchasing power of people in food terms.
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Book: Changing Structure of Global Food Consumption and Trade Shifts in food consumption have led to increased trade and changes in the composition of world agricultural trade. Given different diets, food expenditure and food budget responses to income and price changes vary between developing and developed countries. In developing countries, higher income results in increased demand for meat products, often leading to increased import of live-stock feed.
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Economic data: Population forecast for all countries in the world (total, urban, rural, density,...)
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Economic data: Households socio-economic survey in Uganda
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Economic data: Composition of public expenditure (education, health, defence...) - 69 countries in Africa and other areas (1975-1985)
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Economic data: Human development index (162 countries) A rich report of reflections and data.
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Economic data: Health and disease statistics worldwide
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Essay: Tax base in developing countries How
to increase the tax revenue in
developing countries? By enlarging the tax base the fiscal burden
would be better distributed, comprehending the large informal economy
which is so present in these countries. Unlike in rich countries
where informality is largely a result of the tax burden, the informal
economy in developing countries is largely a result of high fixed
costs of entry into the formal sector. The tax burden is lower
in developing countries and the barriers to entry into the formal
economy are higher. Empirical analysis supports the results of this
paper by prof. Emmanuelle
Auriol and Michael Warlters.
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Interview: Ending Africa's Conflicts Author of "Breaking the Conflict Trap", Professor Paul Collier tries to explain how conflict situations arises in Africa and what can be done to put an end to them. 'Proneness' to civil war can be measured by looking at three specific factors: - Low per capita income - Economic decline - High dependence on natural resources If a country has just one of these then all is well. If, however, a country has all three of these trends they are, he asserts, "playing a game of Russian roulette". Professor Collier confidently reaches this conclusion after looking
at all civil wars worldwide since 1960. By looking at the social,
political, ethnic, religious and economic composition of the affected
countries his evidence led him to suggest during the talk that,
"as far as I can see…civil wars are as likely to start
in democracies as dictatorships". That ethnic and religious
composition had only a very mild effect on a country's potential
for conflict and, in fact, the more diverse a population is the
"less prone" it is to civil war.
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Essay: Technological foresight for South Africa Foresight is a systematic process that seeks to understand the long term. It assumes that there are many possible future scenarios and that the shape of the future we inherit depends on the decisions taken today. An important aspect of foresight is the use of qualitative as well as quantitative methods to set priorities and agree on actions. This process involves widespread consultation among all relevant stakeholders. In South Africa, the Foresight project is being
launched against a reality of declining international competitiveness,
relatively low levels of R&D investment and a need to transform
the national technological goals so as to assure a high level of
innovation. |
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Essay: Renewable energy: how to remove barriers to diffusion - the Malawi case Essay: The Digital Development of Labour Organizations in Africa Essay from the International Labour Office Essay: A map of gender activities in Ghana A survey on the change from Women in Development approach (WID) to Gender and Development (GAD) in practical terms. Essay: Towards continent-wide of integration of energy markets? Efficient, cleaner energy forms are vital to Africa's development and fight against poverty yet the proportion of people still dependent on inefficient and polluting traditional energy sources is higher than any other continent. The traditional approach of constraining energy planning and development within national borders has exacerbated this problem. Africa, as a continent, possesses adequate energy resources for
her development, but their distribution across the continent is
highly uneven. While renewable energy is quite widely disseminated
in Africa, this is not true for the mainstay conventional resources.
Oil and gas are concentrated in north and west Africa, hydroelectric
potential in central and east Africa and coal in southern Africa.
It is this pattern of distribution and of energy use that underlies
the case for regional, and ultimately continent-wide, integration
of energy development.
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