South Africa has just experienced its most competitive election yet. The governing African National Congress was forced to compete for votes for the first time and lost some ground as a result. This ARI examines the implications for government accountability, effective governance and competitive politics.
Algeria has just held what it calls a presidential election. It has done so at intervals since 1995 and these have regularly been a cause for dissatisfaction at home and abroad. But what exactly are these events that so consistently fail to measure up to widespread expectations? This ARI explains that they are not really elections at all and that the expectations entertained in respect of them are entirely misplaced.
When Israel launched the Gaza war on 27 December 2008, it chose an opportune moment. Nonetheless, much like the Lebanon war of 2006, Israel’s strategic gains in ‘Operation Cast Lead’ have dissipated day by day.
The author reviews the economic boom that Angola is currently experiencing in a post-election context, despite the global economic downturn. While Angola’s impressive growth rates were initially a result of high oil prices, increasingly the economy is driven by the non-oil sector, primarily through construction and heavy public spending under the auspices of the national reconstruction programme.
This paper considers how tax havens facilitate capital flight and tax evasion, and how these linked activities undermine developmental processes. This is followed by an examination of the scale of capital flight and tax evasion in Africa, and the potential for the recently proposed offshore financial centre in Accra, Ghana, to exacerbate these problems in the West African region.
This paper presents a scoping analysis of the main contours of relations, offering an anatomy of key dimensions of an expansive Chinese engagement in the continent that remains dynamic.
After four decades of rent-driven development that has systematically killed off competition in the main sectors of the economy, Mauritania remains inherently prone to authoritarian intervention when powerful interests are threatened.
The mixture of hope and despair that followed the March 2008 elections in Zimbabwe and the ensuing violence gave way to the new possibilities offered by the political agreement signed by Zanu PF, the MDC (Tsvangirai) and the MDC (Mutambara) on 11 September 2008.
This ARI looks at the revenue stream likely to accrue to Ghana from oil production which is to start in 2010 and the implications for the economy.
Recent research identifies weak institutions as a leading cause of the under-performance of developing economies. But in low-income economies institutions reflect political incentives rather than mould them, so this paper analyses how political incentives are shaped by commodity revenue.
Ongoing EU negotiations with the African Union have identified a number of clear, achievable steps, which might bring more positive ideals of Mediterranean migration management a little closer.
Sixteen million international migrants originate from sub-Saharan Africa and remittance flows have grown in the last few years, but their impact on development remains unclear.