Suchergebnisse

African countries are among those receiving the most foreign aid per capita. Many detractors blame that aid for encouraging dictatorship and undermining democracy. This article takes a contrary view. It analyses the relationship between the amount of development assistance given to sub-Saharan countries in the 1990s, and changes in their political systems. There is empirical evidence that arbitrary, unrepresentative government diminished in Africa. The data also suggest a positive, though small, correlation between development assistance and democratisation in the 1990s. The issue now facing many African countries is how to consolidate and extend these reforms on their own, with less external support.

Has foreign aid destroyed state institutions in Africa? African states depend on development assistance to conduct basic government operations, yet few of these states are well governed or effective at providing public goods. The two trends, mounting foreign aid and static or diminishing state performance, raise an obvious question: Is aid dependency contributing to misrule and state failure in Africa? Many critics argue the two phenomena are related. I find they are not. My analysis fails to show a negative association between aid receipts and two measures of democracy and economic freedom. Instead, the evidence is consistent with a small, positive relationship between aid and these indicators of state performance. Since the international community seems bent on reducing foreign aid, an important issue is how African states can maintain and improve their performance with less foreign assistance.

This paper reviews empirical evidence concerning government errors of
commission and omission in Africa. Seen in the context of international
comparisons, how do African states measure up in the defensive functions of
avoiding government excess? And how do they rate in the constructive functions
of supplying public goods in response to demands from society? Regarding
errors of commission, African states do not stand out as singularly
prone to spend large shares of GNP, to employ high ratios of the population
in bureaucratic jobs, or to own extensive state-owned enterprises. The data
on errors of omission are more equivocal. African states do too little to prevent
corruption, to protect civil and political rights, and to secure the legal
environment for business. Yet, other developing regions display many of the
same deficiencies. Overall, there is little empirical evidence of a sui generis
African state.

Abstract The international community is redoubling efforts to curb political corruption in the developing and transitional economies. The consensus now is that the abuse of public office stunts economic growth, replacing a formerly dominant view that the effect is neutral or positive. Corruption's political correlates, however, are seldom studied empirically. Using Transparency International's recently developed index of perceived corruption. this paper explores this issue by regression analysis in a sample of less‐developed countries. Economic liberalization, political democratization, and administrative centralization are associated with lower degrees of political corruption.

How close is the link between outsized states and economic stagnation in Africa? This article shows that African public bureaucracies are not as large as often portrayed, that they have been getting smaller, and that reducing their size alone has not been a prescription for economic revival. To the contrary, the countries with higher levels of public employment, such as Botswana and Mauritius, are apt to have the better economic records. These findings suggest that a superabundance of public personnel is not initself?, major impediment to growth in Africa. Too much attention has been paid to quantitative or "first-generation" bureaucratic problems, and too little attention has been given the "second-generation" issues of bureaucratic quality.