Suchergebnisse

Subsaharan African states clearly labor under an extraordinary weight of external debt. A strong groundswell of opinion has fonned behind debt forgiveness efforts. The plight of Africa's poor demands serious response from creditors and donors, not bo mention their own governments. yet the common economic arguments for debt relief find little empirical support in SSA. In particular, there is no evidence of debt overhang serving as a tax on investment or GDP growth. The real problem of external debt in SSA is the heavy marginal tax it levies on current account receipts. Surely this contributes to persistent balance-of-payments crises. The most important dimension of debt relief for SSA states is, thus, less stock reduction than release from the foreign exchange demands of repayment.

This article proposes that objective food price risk differs between rural and urban areas of infrastructure-poor economies characterised by spatially concentrated patterns of foodgrains storage. This difference implies an urban bias having adverse welfare effects for peasants who seasonally switch between net food seller and net food buyer positions. (DSE/DÜI)

MostAfrican states have been engaged in market-oriented economic reforms for the better part of a decade, if not longer. One characteristic of their liberalisation efforts that stands out in empirical studies is the unevenness with which measures have been agreed and implemented. But how do we understand what has been proposed and pursued? Who have been the principal players, what have been their motivations and strategies, when have they been able to influence the choices to be made, and have these conditioned the environment for successive proposals? In short, what are the dynamics of economic liberalisation in contemporary African economics, and what are the prospects for the durability and extension of market-oriented reforms? These questions motivate reflections on the checkered history of agricultural liberalisation in Madagascar.