Paul Collier

This paper analyzes the preconditions for sustained policy turnarounds in failing states. Our dependent variable is the probability of the commencement of a turnaround that eventually becomes both sustained and substantial. We focus upon the explanatory variables of resource rents, education, and aid, distinguishing between finance and technical assistance. Overall, we find that these variables have significant and large effects on the duration of state failure. Appropriate donor intervention can radically shorten state failure, whereas additional finance, whether from aid or resource rents, has the opposite effect.

The impact of climate change on Africa is likely to be severe because of adverse direct effects, high agricultural dependence, and limited capacity to adapt. Direct effects vary widely across the continent, with some areas (e.g. eastern Africa) predicted to get wetter, but much of southern Africa getting drier and hotter. Crop yields will be adversely affected and the frequency of extreme weather events will increase. Adaptation to climate change is primarily a private-sector response and should involve relocation of people, changes in the sectoral structure of production, and changes in crop patterns. The role of government is primarily to provide the information, incentives, and economic environment to facilitate such changes. Adaptation will be impeded by Africa's fragmentation into small countries and ethnic groups, and by poor business environments. On the mitigation side, there is a need to design emissions-trading frameworks that support greater African participation than at present, and that include land-use change. Mitigation undertaken elsewhere will have a major impact on Africa, both positive (e.g. new technologies) and negative (e.g. commodity price changes arising from biofuel policies).

Currently the strategy for promoting internal peace favoured by the international community is to promote democracy, the rationale being that democratic accountability lowers incentives for rebellion. We argue that democracy also constrains the technical possibilities of government repression, and that this makes rebellion easier. Although the net effect of democracy is therefore ambiguous, we suggest that the higher is income the more likely is it to be favourable. Empirically, we find that whereas in rich countries democracy makes countries safer, below an income threshold democracy increases proneness to political violence. We show that these results hold for a wide variety of forms of political violence

Modern theories of political economy analyze the sources of political power and their uses for economic ends. The key instruments are taxation and regulation. Although international political economy treats states as its unit of analysis, the number of states is endogenous. This is highly pertinent for Africa, which has far more states relative to its population than other regions. Africa's many small states face acute difficulties of supplying the core public good of enforced justice and I apply the new economics of lawlessness developed by Dixit to show the consequences. I argue that due to the difficulties of supplying this key public good from within the state, Africa needs to have more recourse to the international provision: both through inter-state cooperation within the region, and through global provision.

Poverty in Africa has been rising for the last quarter-century, while it has been falling in the rest of the developing world. Africa's distinctive problem is that its economies have not been growing. This article attempts to synthesize a range of recent research to account for this failure of the growth process. I argue that the reasons lie not in African peculiarities but rather in geographic features that globally cause problems but that are disproportionately pronounced in Africa. These features interact to create three distinct challenges that are likely to require international interventions beyond the conventional reliance on aid.

A model of the economic effects of civil war and the post-war period is developed. A key feature is the adjustment of the capital stock through capital flight. Post-war this flight can either be reversed or continue, depending partly upon how far the capital stock has adjusted to the war. The model is tested on data for all civil wars since 1960. After long civil wars the economy recovers rapidly, whereas after short wars it continues to decline. We then consider the effect on the composition of economic activity, distinguishing between war-vulnerable and war-safe activities. Evidence for Uganda shows such compositional effects to be substantial.