From a commentary on Owen Barder’s comment on Bob Zoellick’s speech on development discourse: … if we really want to democratise the development discourse we should also publish, say, the minutes of Bank board meetings and other relevant internal documents to understand how ideas and statistics are translated into ‘reality’ through powerful interlocutors like the… Read More »
Off to Basel tomorrow for an African Borderlands Research Network conference. As part of a panel on a comparative study of cross-border trade networks in Africa, I will be presenting a paper titled “Benin-Nigeria secondhand clothing cross-border trade in historical perspective”. The abstract: Today, Benin Republic is the main supplier of secondhand clothing to Nigeria,… Read More »
From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data. It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if… Read More »
The Economist discusses conditional cash transfer schemes here.
Interested in Actor-Network Theory? Check out the video.
A new book by Milford Bateman, who is described as “a freelance consultant specialising in local economic development policy, particularly in relation to the Western Balkans,” is described in the following terms on the publisher’s website: Over the last thirty years or so, microfinance has risen to become one of the most high-profile policies to… Read More »
danah boyd writes in the closing paragraph of a beautifully brilliant rant: Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who… Read More »
This is from Tatalo Alamo, writing for the Nation: Taking inspiration from the conflict tree paradigm, we can say that while the immediate cause and outward foliage of the Jos crisis is economic, ie a conflict arising from allocation of scarce resources and the distribution of political patronage, the root causes are cultural and historical.… Read More »
While the Nigerian Civil War devastated Igbo business activities across Nigeria, and precipitated a mass return of Igbo migrants to their home area, it also laid the foundation for a consolidation and rapid development of Igbo informal enterprise, which has had integrative rather than divisive social and economic consequences for Nigeria as a whole. Operating… Read More »
Our hunch is that its place [culture in development] has already shifted since we wrote Seeing Culture Everywhere. On the one hand, there is China and David Brooks. On the other, there is a new trend in “development thinking” around the World Bank and elsewhere (like Narayan. Pritchett and Kapoor’s Moving out of Poverty and Jessica… Read More »