Suchergebnisse

Research on economic growth and development in developing countries has often highlighted the role of liberalisation policies (economic and political) in improving economic performance in the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, efforts at fostering economic growth and development have not only resulted in the adoption of these policies, but have also led to the proliferation of regional economic integration (include monetary unification). Nonetheless, the impact of these policies on economic performance continues to be a subject of debate among policy makers, development partners, academic researchers, and the international community at large. This debate has become increasingly important in light of the challenges facing the aforementioned agents in helping to improve the economic performance of these countries. This thesis focuses on this topic providing empirical evidence for sub-Saharan African countries. The first chapter uses post-liberalisation data on Ghana and focuses on the extent to which trade openness and foreign aid inflows impact on economic growth. Ghana, being one of the forerunners to adopt liberalisation policies in sub-Saharan Africa, has received commendations from the international community for its post-liberalisation economic growth performance. This has increased government commitment in recent years to open the economy to international competition. Moreover, foreign aid inflows over the period have been relatively large. The study, which employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration, provides empirical findings, which clearly indicate that the impact of both trade openness and foreign aid on Ghana's post-liberalisation economic growth is positive and statistically significant in both the short-run and the long run, although this is somewhat reduced by their interaction. In addition, the study reveals long run economic growth benefits of Ghana's political system whilst government spending and labour force performance retarded economic growth over the study period. The empirical findings and policy recommendations are relevant for Ghana's long-term economic growth policy reforms. The second chapter, taken cognisance of the fact that sub-Saharan Africa has been characterised by low-income levels for decades, analyses the impact of economic globalisation and democracy on income levels in the area using panel cointegration techniques. The study considers a composite indicator for economic globalisation and several indicators of democracy and highlights the essence of the simultaneous adoption of economic globalisation and democracy for sub-Saharan African countries. The empirical results, based on a sample of 31 countries over the period 1980-2005, clearly indicate that, whilst the total long run impact of economic globalisation on income levels has been beneficial, the total long run impact of democracy has been the bane of the level of income in sub-Saharan Africa. The study concludes that policy reforms should be aimed at improving democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa for its potential benefits to be realised The third chapter focuses on the implications of trade openness, foreign aid and democracy for the fulfilment of Wagner's law in West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) countries. Although the impact of trade openness, foreign aid and democracy on government expenditure in developing countries has been emphasised in the literature in recent decades most recent studies of Wagner's law have often neglected the increasing role played by these policy variables. The study provides an empirical analysis of the long run implications of trade openness, foreign aid and democracy for the fulfilment of Wagner's law in WAMZ countries using panel data techniques for the period 1980-2008. The study finds the existence of Wagner's law in WAMZ countries, but only when the role of these policy variables has been catered for. The analysis concludes that, if these countries are to meet the fiscal convergence criteria and ensure the sustainability of a single currency area, explicit sets of restraint on the national authorities and innovative and efficient ways of domestic revenue generation necessary to ensure that government revenue keep pace with its expenditure become crucial, because the monetary union by itself may not necessarily ensure fiscal discipline. The fourth chapter focuses on the relationship between democracy, government spending, and economic growth. Although, economic theory predicts that various core functions of governments are growth enhancing, its spending in non democratic countries often goes beyond these core functions, namely into rent-seeking and non-productive activities. The study employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration to investigate the extent to which democracy and government spending have had an impact on economic growth in Ghana over the period 1960-2008. The empirical results obtained are encouraging, revealing support for the high efficiency of government spending in democracies hypothesis. The study demonstrates that democracy and government spending go hand in hand in providing a complementary role to impact positive on economic growth in Ghana in both the long-and short-run. The fifth chapter investigates the impact of trade openness on economic growth and development for a sample of 85 middle-income countries over the period 1970-2009. The study employs non-stationary heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques that take into consideration the impact of cross-section dependence. The analysis reveals four important findings. Firstly, that trade openness has been one of the main drivers of the level of development, but not of economic growth in middle-income countries. Secondly, that trade openness is both a cause and a consequence of the level of development in middle-income countries. Thirdly, that neglecting the impact of cross-section dependence overestimates the coefficient linked to the long-run relationship between trade openness and development. Lastly, and most importantly, that these results are consistent for all the 20 middle-income sub-Saharan African countries included in the sample.

This article evaluates the trends of democratization over the last 10 years, focusing on the new transitions to democracy taking place in Central-Eastern Europe & sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions where this political process has lately been more pervasive. The basic question addressed is whether the conditions that favored the democratic wave originating in Portugal in the mid-1970s are still able to explain the political transformations that followed the breakdown of the Berlin Wall. For many, the implosion of communism makes any such comparisons impossible. After summarizing some crucial variables suggested by the literature to explain democratic transitions & consolidation, the author tests this hypothesis in both Central-Eastern Europe & sub-Saharan Africa. Initial findings show that, in many cases, the variables that favored democratic transitions before 1989 continued to operate in similar ways thereafter. A few differences aside, in the most recent cases, a number of basic economic, institutional, & cultural conditions continue, as they did earlier, to favor or frustrate democratization. 8 Tables, 42 References. Adapted from the source document.

The democratic reforms introduced in many sub-Saharan African countries during the 1990s involved the restoration of multipartism. The re-emergence of party politics spurred a number of analyses of the continent's new parties & party systems, largely based on theories & concepts derived from the study of advanced democracies. The article reviews & critically examines recent works on Africa's parties & party systems by presenting the dominant themes & issues & by investigating the utility of Western-derived models for the analysis of new multiparty regimes. In spite of a quantitative increase & a qualitative improvement in the study of Africa's parties & party systems, the latter still suffers a scarcity of empirical & theoretical investigations. At the same time, the use of political science tools for the study of party politics south of the Sahara is part of a broader positive trend towards a better integration of the analysis of African politics with that of politics in other world areas. Tables, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

On November 2004 the fifth day of the conference "The Politician" was held at the Political Science University of Pavia. The conference continued to develop the themes covered during the one held in 2003, with more emphasis on the current state & future of Europe after the signing of the European Constitutional Treaty in Rome on October 29, 2004. The doubt that all the twenty-five countries would actually ratify the Constitution gave the conference a peculiar feeling of uncertainty. This article is the synthesis of Gian Paolo Calchi Novati's speech, which focused on International European Policy with respect to peripheral areas such as the Balkans, the Middle-East & Sub-Saharan Africa. Maria Williamson

Five years after the beginning of the Libyan conflict, the political situation is swinging between the efforts for a diplomatic solution under the auspices of the United Nations and the possibility of a new international military intervention. The migratory dimension of the crisis and its increasing dynamics in connection with the Libyan civil war have now become one of the main argument in order to support the plan for a new military intervention in the country. Beyond the conflict, the chapter argues that Libya has continued to be mainly a country of destination despite any recurrent representation of Libya as a country of transit on the route toward Europe. In a context of crisis and state fragmentation, the policies for migrants' containment that Italy and the European Union have implemented in collaboration with the Libyan authorities unexpectedly reveal a process of institutional re-building from 2012 up to the resumption of the civil war in 2014. ; À cinq ans de distance du début du conflit en Libye, la situation oscille aujourd'hui entre les tentatives de médiation sous l'égide des Nations Unies et la menace d'une nouvelle intervention internationale. Précisément, la dimension migratoire de la crise, c'est-à-dire celle des flux liés de différente manière et en différentes directions au cycle de la guerre civile en Libye a fini par accéder au statut d'argument par excellence pour justifier l'hypothèse d'une nouvelle intervention dans le pays. Au-delà des logiques de guerre, le texte montre comment la Libye avait continué à être un pays de destination avant tout, contrairement aux représentations habituelles de ce pays comme simple terre de passage vers l'Europe. En ce sens, les différentes politiques italiennes et européennes mises en oeuvre en collaboration avec les autorités libyennes révèlent que, dans un contexte de crise et de fragmentation de l'État, les politiques migratoires et les intérêts stratégiques européens sont à la base d'un processus de reconstruction institutionnelle entre 2012 et 2014, avant l'escalade du conflit dans le pays. ; À cinq ans de distance du début du conflit en Libye, la situation oscille aujourd'hui entre les tentatives de médiation sous l'égide des Nations Unies et la menace d'une nouvelle intervention internationale. Précisément, la dimension migratoire de la crise, c'est-à-dire celle des flux liés de différente manière et en différentes directions au cycle de la guerre civile en Libye a fini par accéder au statut d'argument par excellence pour justifier l'hypothèse d'une nouvelle intervention dans le pays. Au-delà des logiques de guerre, le texte montre comment la Libye avait continué à être un pays de destination avant tout, contrairement aux représentations habituelles de ce pays comme simple terre de passage vers l'Europe. En ce sens, les différentes politiques italiennes et européennes mises en oeuvre en collaboration avec les autorités libyennes révèlent que, dans un contexte de crise et de fragmentation de l'État, les politiques migratoires et les intérêts stratégiques européens sont à la base d'un processus de reconstruction institutionnelle entre 2012 et 2014, avant l'escalade du conflit dans le pays.

The political project of decolonization was based on a "total, complete, and absolute substitution" (Fanon) of a system with another, but in the urban geography of Sub-Saharan Africa this process has been long, complex and not without ambiguity. On one hand, we observe a radical discontinuity in place names, in the administrative structure and in the monumental landscape of African cities; on the other, postcolonial urban planning and architecture showed strong continuity with the colonial functionalist model. In recent African urban projects as well, we observe the action of a colonial rationality, based on the removal of existing territories and on the production of standardized and fragmented urban spaces.

The research is part of the global history of the Decolonization and Cold War, focusing on the formation and development of the postcolonial states of the former French Sub-Saharan Africa (Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, Congo) and on the intervention of the Superpowers in that area. In this regard, the perception of the two most important Western communist parties, the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party, allows an original viewing angle to reconstruct the history of African nationalist and Marxist countries and movements. The transnational dynamics that have crossed western and equatorial Africa can be analyzed with a global view resulting from the PCI and PCF, defining their political, social and cultural features. The affinities and theoretical differences between the communist parties and African anti-colonial movements, the divisions in the "socialist camp" and the relations between the PCI and the PCF is an "histoire croisée" referring to the sources produced and preserved by these two political parties. It's a joint supervision PhD by "Tor Vergata" University of Rome and Paris 1 "Panthéon-Sorbonne" University. ; La recherche fait partie d'une histoire globale de la décolonisation et de la guerre froide. Cette histoire est centrée sur l'édification et le développement des états postcoloniaux de l'Afrique subsaharienne francophone (Guinée, Mali, Sénégal, Cameroun et Congo) et sur l'intervention des puissances étrangères dans ce territoire. En ce contexte, la perception des deux partis communistes les plus importants de l'Occident, le Parti communiste français et le Parti communiste italien, témoigne d'un point de vue original à l'égard de l'histoire des pays et des mouvements africains nationalistes et marxistes. Les dynamiques transnationales qui concernaient l'Afrique occidentale et équatoriale sont ici analysées avec la visuelle « globale » montrée par les deux partis communistes européens, ce qui définit leurs caractéristiques politiques, sociales et culturelles. Les similarités et ...

The research is part of the global history of the Decolonization and Cold War, focusing on the formation and development of the postcolonial states of the former French Sub-Saharan Africa (Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, Congo) and on the intervention of the Superpowers in that area. In this regard, the perception of the two most important Western communist parties, the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party, allows an original viewing angle to reconstruct the history of African nationalist and Marxist countries and movements. The transnational dynamics that have crossed western and equatorial Africa can be analyzed with a global view resulting from the PCI and PCF, defining their political, social and cultural features. The affinities and theoretical differences between the communist parties and African anti-colonial movements, the divisions in the "socialist camp" and the relations between the PCI and the PCF is an "histoire croisée" referring to the sources produced and preserved by these two political parties. It's a joint supervision PhD by "Tor Vergata" University of Rome and Paris 1 "Panthéon-Sorbonne" University. ; La recherche fait partie d'une histoire globale de la décolonisation et de la guerre froide. Cette histoire est centrée sur l'édification et le développement des états postcoloniaux de l'Afrique subsaharienne francophone (Guinée, Mali, Sénégal, Cameroun et Congo) et sur l'intervention des puissances étrangères dans ce territoire. En ce contexte, la perception des deux partis communistes les plus importants de l'Occident, le Parti communiste français et le Parti communiste italien, témoigne d'un point de vue original à l'égard de l'histoire des pays et des mouvements africains nationalistes et marxistes. Les dynamiques transnationales qui concernaient l'Afrique occidentale et équatoriale sont ici analysées avec la visuelle « globale » montrée par les deux partis communistes européens, ce qui définit leurs caractéristiques politiques, sociales et culturelles. Les similarités et les différences entre ces deux partis communistes et les mouvements anticoloniaux africains, ainsi que les fractures internes au « camp socialiste » et les relations entre PCI et PCF constituent une histoire croisée qui fait référence aux sources produites et conservées par ces deux organisations politiques. Il s'agit d'une thèse en cotutelle entre l'Université de Rome « Tor Vergata » et l'Université Paris 1 « Panthéon-Sorbonne ».