hina is now the biggest foreign player in Africa. It’s Africa’s largest trade partner, the largest infrastructure financier, and the fastest-growing source of foreign direct investment. Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding into the continent, investing in long-term assets such as factories and heavy equipment.
Author: CASADE
This book assesses the challenges and provides concrete policy recommendations that can be taken by Africa’s leaders and citizens in the key areas to reset their economic trajectory, achieve their desired convergence, and meet the aspirations of their people.
Many new development initiatives have been introduced in Africa over the past few decades. Each of these has been heralded as marking a new era in the continent’s development.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the dubious distinction of having the lowest electricity generation capability, and its inhabitants suffer the most debilitating energy poverty in the world. Of the over one billion residents of the sub-continent, an estimated 631 million of them are without reliable access to electricity;
Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch. Abstract. We find anecdotal evidence suggesting that governments in poor countries have a more left wing rhetoric than those in OECD countries. Thus, it appears that capitalist rhetoric doesn’t flow to poor countries. A possible explanation is that corruption, which is more widespread in poor countries, reduces more the electoral appeal of capitalism than that of socialism. The empirical pattern of beliefs within countries is consistent with this explanation: people who perceive corruption to be high in their country are also more likely to lean left ideologically (and to declare support for a more…
John O. Ifediora. It is the irony of human nature, and indeed the incentive mechanism inherent in social institutions, that some societies less endowed by nature strive harder to improve their collective lot, and in many instances succeed in achieving their development objectives more frequently than their counterparts with more favorable allotments of natural resources. And if necessity is truly the mother of invention, then the sorry economic conditions of many resource-rich African nations may not be so ironic after all. When it comes to wasted wealth, and the problems that bedevil poor countries that are rich in natural resources, especially…
The massive devaluation of the Naira by the CBN has left Nigerians scratching their heads and each others head. As they ponder the fate of the Naira, and why so many on fixed income see a rapid erosion of their purchasing power, the Council now feels compelled to provide elucidation. While this effort may not provide any relief of collective anxiety, it should provide a sense of direction.
James Williams. Poverty and violence crisscross ethnographies of the African city. This is especially pronounced in anthropological research from South Africa, where considerable efforts are made to describe and document poverty and violence across segregated cityscapes. Correlations between poverty and vulnerability are often asserted in the literature: the “poorest of the poor” are presented repeatedly as the persons most susceptible to violence and harm. In this paper I aim to complicate how poverty and vulnerability are conventionally linked. Drawing from fieldwork on young African migrants’ informal work in Cape Town, I show how hazardous slight gains in prosperity can prove.…
The appointment of Professor Ibrahim Gambari as the new Chief of Staff to President Buhari of Nigeria is a wise decision. It is an important position that can only be occupied by an important person, and professor Gambari, by all meaningful standards, is an important person.
Rejoice Ngwenya. Africa’s real per capita income today is lower than in the 1970s, leaving many African countries as poor as they were forty years ago. I would not like to seek a consensus of the definition of ‘development ‘ but like oxygen, it is the absence of liberal democracy that is a catalyst of under-development. Political scientists at Harvard and economists the world over talk about the human development index – inter alia a quantitative analyses life expectancy at birth, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Development that lacks a human face is as bad as democracy that…