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 »
Examining data from China – the biggest internal migration experience in human history – this column finds that migrants from the same village tend to cluster at the same destination for the same occupation. This pattern is driven by social networks within villages that reduce the moving costs for future migrants, such as the risk… Read More »
… called Baobab. The description in the current edition of the newspaper: …it will delve into politics, econoics and culture, and comment on the successes of Africa’s peaceful elections and foreign investment as well as on Africa’s troubles. This is hoping that the language in which the discussions and analyses are framed will not be one… Read More »
BBC’s World Business news discusses the soon-to-be-effected East African common market. The common market will include Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda and Rwanda. It will create a trading bloc of about 130 million people. The positive point is that trade will be easier among the countries of the common market, and the common market will be… Read More »
From WSJ: Foreign consumer-goods companies including Coca-Cola Co., Nestlé SA and Unilever PLC have been in Africa for decades without much competition from local players. Now, home-grown companies are expanding aggressively across the continent, eager to accommodate a growing middle-class among the billion-person population. Examples? Among the most prominent of these consumer upstarts: African retailers… Read More »
The Economist interviews Dele Ogun, head of the Genesis Project, on the political situation in Nigeria.
Stephen Smith writes in the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine about the relationship between France and its former colonies in Africa. One of the things he looks at is what has changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and what has not. There is a little about the economic relations, but I miss a… Read More »
Deborah Brautigam thinks so. And she should know, since she recently wrote a book on China in Africa, titled The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. She said this in an interview with the Aid Watch blog: As a donor, China’s way has several advantages. Take the way they operate. They rarely “poach”… Read More »
1. How Mathematics might have caused the financial crisis 2. To which Gillian Tett says, Bad practice, not the discipline itself, is to blame for the financial crisis 3. Sex and the single black (American) woman 4. On Goodluck Jonathan’s Amanpour interview 5. Joe Stiglitz: An Agenda for Reforming Economic Theory 6. Zimbabwe hangman position… Read More »
Extracts: Collier’s work is not informed by any explicit, overarching theory of development or any historical perspective that might inform one; nor does he offer any social analysis. There is an implicit theory of human behaviour, which is radically reductionist—individual economic self-interest rules. In this view, history appears to be a continuum of ‘14th-century reality:… Read More »