This book explores successful efforts to alleviate poverty, and enquires whether any of the features of these policies or projects can be imported into environments where poverty has not yet declined significantly. Using cross-national data the book demonstrates that there is substantial scope for policies to reduce poverty - some countries have much lower poverty incidence than would be identifies rules that appear to underlie success in programmes to bring credit to the poor, and thereby to help them to escape poverty by building up income-yielding physical capital. Michael Lipton is Research Professor of the Poverty Research Unit at the University of Sussex, and author of many books on poverty and developing countries

http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/documents/publication/wcms_123434.pdf

Successes in anti-poverty

Many sub-Saharan countries have experienced slow economic growth in the past three decades, some having endured several consecutive years of serious economic malaise. This dismal situation has often been associated with the debt problem (sometimes seen as a cause and sometimes as an effect). Socioeconomic reform since the late 1970s, and especially during the 1980s, has centered on debt-alleviating strategies formulated and implemented primarily under the auspices and supervision of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. This study approaches the issues of debt and socioeconomic reform in two ways: first, as an assessment of the relative performance of strong and weak reform countries during the 1980s; and, using this as a background, by reform to the process of structural transformation that occurs under the impetus of domestic and international market forces.

IMF-World Bank Adjustment and Structural Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Cet article etudie le comportement des commercants de betail en Somalie du Sud dans les conditions d'un marche precaire, d'un declin macro-economique et d'un contexte politique instable. L'analyse attire l'attention sur les types de relations bivalentes et de strategies de diversification qui permettent aux commercants de betail de supporter les longues periodes de precarite. En distinguant quatre marches differents et cinq types de facteurs de marche, l'etude s'efforce de demeler les complexites du commerce de betail dans la Somalie du Sud, et de differencier deux categories de negociants, ceux qui ont fait du profit, et ceux qui ont pâti des recents changements. L'analyse semble indiquer que, dans la situation actuelle de crise en Somalie, les commercants qui sont devenus les agents de gros negociants tournes vers l'exportation et centres sur un marche unique, s'averent les plus atteints, alors que ceux qui sont etablis dans de petits villages et qui sont impliques dans des marches a la fois interieurs et d'exportation ont parfois prospere. Le commerce de betail entretenu de facon soit-disant officieuse avec les pays voisins, comme le Kenya, permet a certains groupes de rechapper a un environnement d'une extreme instabilite economique et politique, exceptionnelle meme dans un tel contexte comme l'Afrique. L'article conclut par un debat general sur l'importance des relations sociales dans le commerce et sur les reactions des negociants face aux changements survenus dans les indicateurs macro-economiques.

Traders, Brokers and Market 'Crisis' in Southern Somalia

The Making of the African Road offers anthropological accounts of the infrastructural, economic, political, historical as well as experiential dimensions of the African long-distance road and explores its emerging orders

The Making of the African Road

Since the collapse of the Somali state, Nairobi's Eastleigh estate has played host to thousands of Somali refugees and developed from a quiet residential suburb to a major East African commercial hub. This article examines this transformation, arguing that it builds on pre-existing cross border trade networks, as well as diaspora and Kenyan sources of capital, and regional and global processes that intensified in the early 1990s. The Eastleigh story provides a lens through which we trace economic changes associated with Somalia's extended statelessness, in particular how connective fabric has been generated and sustained in this stateless period. However, the Eastleigh story is not just one of Somali statelessness, but also of interaction with other states. In particular, this article focuses on the ambiguous relationship of Eastleigh to the Kenyan state, suggesting that Somali business in Eastleigh, although born of a collapsed state and informality, is integrated in various ways into the formal...

Vali Jamal

Papers

Somalia: Understanding an Unconventional Economy

Inequalities and Adjustment in Uganda