Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study investigates the role of institutions in shaping international differences in economic complexity—a novel measure of productive capabilities. More specifically, economic complexity corresponds to an enhanced capacity to produce and export a diverse range of sophisticated (high-productivity) products. This paper hypothesizes that there exists a positive association between institutional quality and economic complexity. The underlying intuition is that well-functioning institutions fundamentally drive structural transformation towards productive activities via strengthening incentives for innovative entrepreneurship, fostering human capital accumulation, and deploying human resources in acquiring productive capabilities. Employing data for up to 115 countries, I consistently obtain precise estimates of the positive effect of institutional quality, measured by the Economic Freedom of the World Index, on economic complexity. The main findings advocate for establishing a pro-development institutional environment, which helps attenuating the persistence of underdevelopment by fostering economic complexity.

Aid donors pursue a strategy of targeted development with regard to recipient states. The determinants of aid allocation have shifted significantly. Industrialized states are increasingly unable to insulate themselves from spillovers caused by underdevelopment abroad. Donors attempt to use aid to decrease these spillovers, targeting developing countries where the effects on the donor are anticipated to be large. Once a recipient is chosen, concern for recipient government capacity guides the composition of aid. Empirical analysis of aid allocation from 1973 to 2012 demonstrates that, while explanations based on security and economic ties to the donor explain allocation well in the Cold War, the post-2001 period is best understood by incorporating a role for targeted development. This framework helps synthesize various findings in the aid allocation literature and has important implications for studying aid effectiveness.

Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades had an adverse effect on economic development.

Theory and extensive evidence connect poverty and underdevelopment to civil conflict yet evidence on the impact of development programs on violence is surprisingly mixed. To break this impasse, we exploit a within-country policy experiment to examine the conditions under which antipoverty programs reduce violence. The roll-out of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme caused a large long-run reduction in Maoist conflict violence, as measured with an original data set based on local-language press sources. These pacifying effects were not uniform, however, but overwhelmingly concentrated in districts with sufficient pre-existing local state capacity to implement the program effectively. The results demonstrate the potential for anti-poverty programs to mitigate violent civil conflict by improving livelihoods, but also highlight the crucial role of state capacity in shaping these effects.

Why do some countries fail to govern their territory? Incomplete domestic sovereignty, defined as the absence of effective state authority over territory, has severe consequences in terms of security, order, economic growth, and human well-being. These negative consequences raise the question of why such spaces remain without effective authority. While the international relations literature suggests that state weakness persists because of an absence of war and the comparative politics literature treats political underdevelopment as the consequence of domestic factors that raise the costs of exercising authority, these views are incomplete. I argue that hostile neighbors weaken state authority over territory through a strategy of foreign interference. Foreign interference in domestic sovereignty is a powerful instrument of statecraft that can yield domestic and foreign policy benefits. I investigate the effects of hostile neighboring states through a cross-national, within-country statistical analysis utilizing a novel indicator of state authority, and pair this analysis with a qualitative case study of Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s. Together, this evidence shows how this international factor is an underappreciated yet important contributor to weak state authority even after accounting for domestic factors. The study's conclusions challenge our understanding of the effects of international politics on internal political development.

In previous analyses of regional underdevelopment, aspects such as technological progress, the implications of growth theory, depreciation (especially capital), capital input, and technology input have been completely ignored. Desmet and Ortίn analyze rational underdevelopment using a Ricardian model. This study investigates the underdevelopment of regions in the light of the Solow model. Two regions with two sectors are considered for the model. The regions are characterized by different technological equipment. The first region is industrial. The second region has an agricultural character. When a new technology is available, both regions can benefit under certain conditions. Financial transfers between regions equalize incomes. The security of transfer payments is positive; the increase in income levels without an increase in productivity is negative. The regions have different depreciation rates, factors, and technology endowments. Enlargement to a growth theoretical model framework (Solow model) should demonstrate the effects of an economy’s investments, constant depreciation rates, population growth, and technological progress. This will make it possible to see how the new influencing factors influence the utility of the two regions.

The study is based on the hypothesis that there is a link between corruption and underdevelopment and that corruption is responsible for the shortcomings and poor performance of the Nigerian political economy. In addition to examining the historical trajectory of corruption in Nigeria, this paper delves into the underlying causes of corruption as well as its cumulative impact on national development in the country. Lastly, the paper assesses some public and private sector initiatives that have been taken and that might stem the tide of corruption.

This article brings an intimate perspective to bear upon the violence of economic sanctions, shifting attention away from an exclusive focus on state actors, in order to examine how “‘wounds” enter politics’.1 In this research, I ‘stretch’ Berlant’s notion of the intimate public, reconfiguring it as a decolonial analytic lens on subaltern suffering in conditions of endemic imperial violence. I focus on the Facebook page of the Iranian chief negotiator, Javad Zarif, during Iran’s talks with the P5+1 powers over its nuclear programme, under the pressure of what the Obama administration itself termed ‘crippling’ economic sanctions. Examining Zarif’s audience’s readings of his back injury during the talks as representing the ‘crippled’ nation, I trace how subaltern injury is intimately narrated through a racialised framework of disablement and ‘recovery’, where ‘recovery’ signifies a desanctioned and deracialised national body. I firstly complicate the prevailing conception of the intimate public as oriented around a ‘national fantasy’, theorising it as an affective structure that simultaneously locates imperial power, as well as the nation-state, as sources of complaint and hope; secondly, I draw on a critical disability (‘crip’) lens to understand the intimate public as mediating both the debilitation of racialised underdevelopment, and the fantasy of a normative, ‘developed’ national body in a post-sanctions future. Through examining the intimate politics of economic sanctions, this study contributes to a decolonial perspective on the entanglements of affect, nationalism and imperial violence.

Africa is often seen as a continent of mass migration and displacement caused by poverty, violent conflict and environmental stress. Yet such perceptions are based on stereotypes rather than theoretically informed empirical research. Drawing on the migration and visa databases from the Determinants of International Migration (DEMIG project) and the Global Bilateral Migration Database (GBMD), this paper explores the evolution and drivers of migration within, towards and from Africa in the post-colonial period. Contradicting common ideas of Africa as a ‘continent on the move’, the analysis shows that intra-African migration intensities have gone down. This may be related to state formation and the related imposition of barriers towards free movement in the wake of decolonisation as well as the concomitant rise of nationalism and inter-state tensions. While African migration remains overwhelmingly intra-continental, since the late 1980s there has been an acceleration and spatial diversification (beyond colonial patterns) of emigration out of Africa to Europe, North America, the Gulf and Asia. This diversification of African emigration seems partly driven by the introduction of visa and other immigration restrictions by European states. Contradicting conventional interpretations of African migration being essentially driven by poverty, violence and underdevelopment, increasing migration out of Africa seems rather to be driven by processes of development and social transformation which have increased Africans’ capabilities and aspirations to migrate, a trend which is likely to continue in the future.

Current cross-national research suggests that increased economic dependence by peripheral countries on core ones is associated with poor maternal health outcomes and greater socioeconomic inequalities in the periphery. However, not enough attention has been given to analyzing how this economic dependence—via foreign direct investment (FDI), importation, and exportation between peripheral and core nations—specifically influences periphery utilization of postnatal  care. Utilizing a world-systems framework, this study examines data from the Tanzania Demographic Health Survey (TDHS) and World Development Indicators (WDI) from the World Bank to shed light on the detrimental impacts of economic dependence on Tanzania’s postnatal care utilization between 2010–2016. Findings show that data constructed around socioeconomic status, rural/urban residence, and region disclose noteworthy negative correlations for importation, exportation, foreign direct investment, and Tanzanian postnatal care utilization over 2010–2016. Even after controlling for these factors, it was observed that marginalized women in Tanzania continued to have significantly lower utilization of both mother's and newborn postnatal care during this period. Higher and statistically significant inequalities in the use of newborn postnatal care were also found for rural women with less than secondary education compared to urban women with the same education level. These findings highlight the need to consider economic dependence on core countries when crafting policies and strategies for addressing disproportional effects on postnatal healthcare utilization among underserved women in Tanzania.