The State in a Changing World

This article examines the expansion of agribusiness and the evolution of land grabbing in Brazil and Mozambique. The modernization of Brazil’s agricultural sector, which began in the 1960s, success...

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Land Grabbing, Agribusiness and the Peasantry in Brazil and Mozambique

Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa

The incidence of corruption appears to vary strongly across societies even for comparable activities. The model highlights how the profitability of bureaucratic corruption may be related to its frequency and points toward a few mechanisms that can be used in explaining the stylized facts of varying incidence of corruption. There might be multiple self-fulfilling equilibria levels of corruption even when both supply and demand of corrupt acts are considered.

How corruption may corrupt

Donor-sponsored anti-corruption programmes represent an increasingly large segment of international development assistance to Africa. While the ostensible objective of these programmes is to reduce African corruption the generality of them suggests that other factors appear to motivate their design and implementation. This paper attempts to assess the generality of these programmes by looking at the specificity relevance and fit of proposed anti-corruption activities. The malleability of these programmes suggests that programme design draws from a mix of broader discursive fields and the genuine attempt to improve project performance and decrease corruption. (authors)

What Do African Donor-sponsored Anti-corruption Programmes Teach Us about International Development in Africa?

Despite the existence of empirical studies linking Africa’s current underdevelopment to its colonial history, a formal theoretical explanation of this link has yet to be made. How could colonialism have had apparently lasting impacts? I provide a game-theoretic model that explains how extraction, taking the form of the slave trade and colonial control, resulted in a permanent increase in rent-seeking behavior and a permanent decrease in the security of private property, both of which have helped foster Africa’s current underdevelopment. JEL classic ation: B52; C72; D72; D74; J24

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Nathan Nunn

Papers

The Legacy of Colonialism: A Model of Africa's Underdevelopment