too fine for undergraduate readers who are new to agrarian debates. On the whole, however, the book is accessible and deserves to be widely read. The condition of rural populations in much of the global South is indeed dire-most of the 1 billion people living on less than a dollar a day live in the countryside. This book offers many important insights into why this is the case, and how the current regime of global capitalism works against a repetition of the agrarian transition that brought wealth and security to the global North.

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

https://cyberleninka.org/article/n/650460.pdf

Determinants of the Level of Informality of Informal Micro-Enterprises: Some Evidence from the City of Lahore, Pakistan

Rethinking Indonesia's Informal Sector

Despite their ubiquity, observational studies to infer the causal effect of a so-called immutable characteristic, such as race or sex, have struggled for coherence, given the unavailability of a manipulation analogous to a “treatment” in a randomized experiment and the danger of posttreatment bias. We demonstrate that a shift in focus from actual traits to perceptions of them can address both of these issues while facilitating articulation of other critical concepts, particularly the timing of treatment assignment. We illustrate concepts by discussing the designs of various studies of the role of race in trial court death penalty decisions.

Causal Effects of Perceived Immutable Characteristics

Our article contributes to the emerging micro-level strand of the literature on the link between local variations in weather shocks and conflicts by focusing on a pixel-level analysis for North and South Sudan between 1997 and 2009. Temperature anomalies are found to strongly affect the risk of conflict, whereas the risk is expected to magnify in a range of 24–31% in the future under a median scenario. Our analysis also sheds light on the competition over natural resources, in particular water, as the main driver of such relationship in a region where pastoralism constitutes the dominant livelihood.

/pdf/local-warming-and-violent-conflict-in-north-and-south-sudan-3344uzymkw.pdf

Local warming and violent conflict in North and South Sudan

We use census panel data on Ethiopian manufacturing firms to analyze the connections between enterprise agglomeration, firm-level output prices and physical productivity We find a negative and statistically significant relationship between the agglomerat

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81037/1/727530461.pdf

Enterprise Agglomeration, Output Prices, and Physical Productivity : Firm-Level Evidence from Ethiopia

https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/21525/1/gupea_2077_21525_1.pdf

Ethnic Cleansing or Resource Struggle in Darfur? An empirical analysis

In this study, we investigate the relationship between exporting and firm performance using a longer panel dataset of Ethiopian manufacturing firms for the period 1996â€“2009. We test two hypotheses regarding exporting: selection into exporting versus lea

/pdf/learning-to-export-and-learning-by-exporting-the-case-of-zlcaw93dxb.pdf

Learning to Export and Learning by Exporting : the Case of Ethiopian Manufacturing

In this study, a number of factors have been considered as potential determinants of institutional quality in Sub- Saharan African countries. The empirical analysis has shown that historical factors such as state legitimacy determine the quality of current institutions in the region. Foreign aid dependence is found to erode quality of governance as measured by rule of law. Variability of aid is found to counterbalance the destructive nature of high level of aid dependence. However, the last result is not retained in the robust regression analysis performed. Countries with strong political constraints on the ruling elites, proxied by checks and balances between executive and legislative branches of governments, and press freedom, are found to have better quality of institutions. Large countries and those closer to equator are disadvantaged in their success of building better quality institutions. Unlike the popular discussions, ethnic fractionalization and identity of last coloniser do not explain variations in institutional quality in the region. The paper also devotes a section for a case study of Ethiopian institutional development to complement the cross country analysis by adding cultural, historical and political specificities.

/pdf/determinants-of-institutional-quality-in-sub-saharan-african-1r4vls3tsp.pdf

Eyerusalem Siba

Papers

Enterprise Agglomeration, Output Prices, and Physical Productivity : Firm-Level Evidence from Ethiopia

Ethnic Cleansing or Resource Struggle in Darfur? An empirical analysis

Learning to Export and Learning by Exporting : the Case of Ethiopian Manufacturing

Determinants of Institutional Quality in Sub-Saharan African Countries

Returns to Physical Capital in Ethiopia: Comparative Analysis of Formal and Informal Firms