Category Archives: Development thinking

Those studies, largely performed in the 1970s and ’80s, used data to discuss how land tenure (say, sharecropping) affects farm productivity, how different types of labor relations in agriculture affect wages and employment of poor workers, how interlocking land-labor-credit relations … Continue reading →

L’ex-ministre de l’économie, Moïse Koumoué Koffi (« Politique économique et ajustement structurel en Côte d’Ivoire », L’Harmattan, Paris, 1994) et, avant lui, Samir Amin (« Le développement du capitalisme en Côte d’Ivoire », Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1967), ont analysé … Continue reading →

When I was in the sixth form we were taken on a school visit to see Ted Hughes at the Yorkshire Playhouse. I remember sitting in the front row and tittering as the tall man stepped out from the curtain … Continue reading →

Une autre personnalité cultive depuis de nombreuses années des relations ambigües avec le Soudan : Erik Prince. Le fondateur de la société militaire privée Blackwater, controversée pour ses méthodes musclées, notamment en Irak, s’est reconverti dans le conseil après avoir … Continue reading →

Two startups offering delivery via e-commerce…. 12 million people in Lagos is a lot of potential customers… A l’heure où les économies africaines comme celle du Nigeria décollent, les consommateurs et une classe moyenne émergente participent de plus en plus … Continue reading →

And that is what Winking and Mizer did in a paper now in press and available online (paywall) in Evolution and Human Behavior, using participants, fittingly enough, in Las Vegas. Here’s what they did. Two confederates were needed. The first, … Continue reading →

I’ve been friends with Abass since Christmas, when he sold me a length of cloth with the letters ‘VIP’ printed in green bubbles. There was something very straightforward about him and especially I liked his choice of cloths, a small … Continue reading →

Here’s how it works, apparently: (1) Start with tiny mistake of not recognizing that you got really really rich because you were lucky.  (Right place, right time, born in U.S. not in Colombia, father not a drug addict or violent … Continue reading →

Les auteurs du document expliquent s’être rendus dans vingt villages différents de cette région forestière et avoir constaté que les locaux n’étaient pas informés des conséquences de l’implantation de cette firme agro-alimentaire. L’enquête s’est déroulée en février, mais le cas … Continue reading →

Reading about the Alatona irrigation project the MCC paid for in Segou area of Mali.  According to the document, the project cost $253 million and benefited 8,000 people by creating irrigation of about 5,000 hectares.  So the cost per hectare … Continue reading →

A big part of development economics is about justifying expenditures of public monies.  Why are people better off with spending tax money this way? Who is better off?  Who is worse off? Why are those better off not able or … Continue reading →

Strictly for the Afro-pessimists…. Since the April 12 coup, more small twin-engine planes than ever are making the 1,600-mile Atlantic crossing from Latin America to the edge of Africa’s western bulge, landing in Guinea-Bissau’s fields, uninhabited islands and remote estuaries. … Continue reading →

More idiotic hyperbole from the OLPC people, who want to take your money away from proper libraries with proper books.  Ask yourself, if he has to outright lie about the product, why should anyone give any money to it? The … Continue reading →

One of my PhD advisors at Berkeley was Michael Watts, whose wonderful, massive, and dense work Silent Violence was a great inspiration…. but like Pinker remember thinking that while I understood the argument– social structure led to outcomes, like death … Continue reading →

We ask whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ self-interest. To investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We … Continue reading →

Publicity-hungry entrepreneurs have special advisors who sit in rooms all day cooking up catchy one-liners that will get them noticed, never mind the incoherence of whatever they have to say.  The latest such is Magatte Wade, a Senegalese skin-care mogul-in-the-waiting … Continue reading →

According to the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson, economic development hinges on a single factor: a country’s political institutions. More specifically, as they explain in their new book, Why Nations Fail, it depends on the existence … Continue reading →