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This is volume I of a four volume set, with papers developed as part of a large-scale project and associated conference series funded by the Gates Foundation. It is comprised of careful empirical reports on progress with economic, political, and social development in Africa over recent decades. Papers are grouped by a rough hierarchy of development. The first volume therefore deals with the essential issues that any country must resolve if there is to be any kind of sustained economic growth and shared benefits from development: is there social peace, does the government function in any kind of reasonable manner, and how does the private sector cope with government dysfunction? The broad theme of our project was that Africa has made much more progress with economic and social development than is widely supposed, and that there is a great deal of success – particularly since 1990 – from which lessons can be gleaned. The papers in this volume deal with ensuring peace after civil conflict, establishing a robust level of revenue for government, thinking about the implications of who holds political power, creating secure property rights, and understanding the nature of the informal economy. Papers also cover important policy innovations, both around road safety and economic development more broadly. We also include a paper that could become a model of how to measure changes in household and per capita income using available data from Africa, and a detailed case study that focuses on the impact of foreign aid on growth.

This is Volume II of a four set series that reports on progress with economic, political, and social development in Africa over recent decades. Volume I deals with social peace, the basic functioning (or not) of government, and how to measure economic development at the household level. Volume II is focused on human capital. This includes public health and various efforts to improve the empowerment–and thus the human development outcomes–for women and girls. We place these issues in a broad economic context, and also include some cutting-edge research on other dimensions of human capital in the African development context. As with the overall economic picture on the past two decades, there are signs of improvement along purely social dimensions of development in Africa. Volume I established that the institutional context for development in Africa remains difficult. But a key theme in Volume II is that no one should conclude that African specifics imply nothing works or that everything becomes corrupted into being completely ineffective. Our researchers have identified important issues, as well as interventions or policy innovations that appear to be gaining traction. The companion volumes III and IV deal with modernization and sustainable growth respectively. Countries covered in detail in this volume include Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia.

This is Volume III of a four volume set that reports on progress with economic, political, and social development in Africa over recent decades. Volume I deals with the essential issues of social stability and other prerequisites for growth. Volume II covers health, gender, and education, all of which are of first-order importance if people are to benefit from and contribute to economic development. Volume III focuses on specific issues of modernization and three key sectors or types of economic activity: finance, mobile phones, and exports. The papers in Volume III contain some firm-level analysis, studies of specific sectors, and cross-country econometrics. We did not attempt to build a comprehensive picture across all countries, but there is a great deal of information about what is going on in wide range of countries – the chapters in this volume contain more in-depth studies of Burundi, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Our main goal was to provide a catalyst for applied research on Africa, and this set of papers demonstrates how we set about achieving that objective. The authors include top researchers, among them people with a great deal of Africa experience and those for whom this was their first time digging into African realities.

This is Volume IV of a four volume set reporting on research on Africa funded by the Gates Foundation. Volume I is focused on conditions that make growth possible; Volume II deals with human development; and Volume III discusses ways in which modernization has come to sub-Saharan Africa, including banking, mobile phones, and dimensions of the export sector. Volume IV examines whether recent African growth rates will prove sustainable. This volume offers three different ways to address this general question. First, five of our research teams look at the details of African agriculture, ranging from its overall prospects to the specific institutional arrangements in two countries. As in our other volumes, the chapters here set a high standard in terms of putting together high quality data and analyzing it using appropriate statistical and econometric technique. Second, one team looked carefully at barriers to trade within West Africa – what keeps markets segmented and prevents trade from developing? Can these obstacles be overcome in the foreseeable future? Four teams look at particular country case studies to understand growth and development and also pay considerable attention to episodes of poor economic performance. Researchers participating in this project were encouraged to combine careful NBER-type empirical analysis with investigations of specific country experiences. In terms of in-depth country analysis, this volume includes material on Cape Verde, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.

This book is a unique collaboration that looks at derivative finance from the standpoint of the social sciences and the social sciences from that of finance. It joins experts from different intellectual backgrounds with disparate trajectories of application. These include knowledge domains of financial engineering, sociology, anthropology, arts activism, media/cultural studies, design, and philosophy. The social reading of the derivative draws upon discussions of the gift, ritual, play, and performativity while the derivative reading of the social adds concepts like volatility and arbitrage to our social science tool-kit. It creates new juxtapositions to understand the relations between finance and society in our contemporary “derivative capitalism,” like Black and Weber on uncertainty, the gift as a contingent claim, or even the “derivative” nature of skateboarding. The book argues that the breakthrough in derivative finance is the discovery and pricing of volatility, enshrined in the Black-Scholes model. Yet the discovery of volatility is also a cultural phenomenon and this book provides the intellectual framework for understanding it, which is especially important in our “culture and politics of volatility.” The mathematical arcana of contemporary finance often prevent dialog and accessible cross-fertilization among disparate domains. But to avoid the technical leaves us in the dark about how derivative finance insinuates itself into the social. By bringing together diverse authors, the book is a new model for collaboration in which academic disciplines and professional practice work together to understand the social dimensions of the derivative and the derivative dimensions of contemporary capitalism.

This volume collects a series of essays by prominent economists on each of the major means-tested, or welfare, programs in the United States. Each essay covers the institutional history of a program, the policy issues surrounding it, its rules and regulations, its history of expenditure and caseloads, and, most importantly, a summary of the research that economists have conducted on the program and the findings from that research. The volume is an update of a popular first volume in 2003 which became a reference Handbook on the shelf of all economists and policy-makers who work on, or who are interested in, transfer programs in the United States. The new volume focuses primarily on the changes in programs which have occurred since 2003 and the results of new research since that date. The volume will be a timely contribution to on-going policy discussions in Washington and elsewhere, bringing the available evidence to bear on the many issues surrounding those programs. The specific transfer programs covered in the volume are the Medicaid program, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Supplemental Security Income Program, subsidized housing programs, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (Food Stamps). In addition, two chapters in the volume cover not traditional transfer programs but rather programs which are intended to increase the human capital of adults and children.

This volume collects a series of essays by prominent economists on each of the major means-tested, or welfare, programs in the United States. Each essay covers the institutional history of a program, the policy issues surrounding it, its rules and regulations, its history of expenditure and caseloads, and, most importantly, a summary of the research that economists have conducted on the program and the findings from that research. The volume is an update of a popular first volume in 2003 which became a reference Handbook on the shelf of all economists and policy-makers who work on, or who are interested in, transfer programs in the United States. The new volume focuses primarily on the changes in programs which have occurred since 2003 and the results of new research since that date. The volume will be a timely contribution to on-going policy discussions in Washington and elsewhere, bringing the available evidence to bear on the many issues surrounding those programs. The specific transfer programs covered in the volume are the Medicaid program, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Supplemental Security Income Program, subsidized housing programs, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (Food Stamps). In addition, two chapters in the volume cover not traditional transfer programs but rather programs which are intended to increase the human capital of adults and children.

This book bridges the gap between what academics know and what innovation stakeholders— from managers, to investors, to analysts, to consumers—need to know about how new products and services are expected to perform in the marketplace. The book develops a compelling framework that connects the rich academic knowledge on innovation diffusion with that on customer relationship management, thereby marrying our understanding of how consumers adopt innovations with how firms effectively acquire, serve, and retain customers. The result, aptly called innovation equity, is a lens through which to view the commercial potential of innovations. It is a powerful vehicle for placing a dollar value on new products and services that are about to be, or that have recently been, launched. The book further shows how the framework can be used to evaluate the implications of marketing actions, consumer heterogeneity, competition, successive technology generations, and globalization on innovation equity assessments. The exposition is replete with vivid examples from a wide array of domains (such as video games, wireless phone services, computers, tablets, satellite radio, electric vehicles, cloud-based software, pharmaceuticals, and more), which demonstrate how the topics covered apply to real-world situations. A set of hands-on tools for implementing the various topics is provided and, for the interested reader, a companion website features concrete templates that can be adapted to any context. The writing style is highly engaging and the core messages are conveyed using simple, easy-to-grasp language and terminology.

At independence from British colonial rule (1947), India inherited from the Raj a complex legal system, including elaborate laws about private property and commercial contracts. Opinions differ on the quality of the legacy. Some historians suggest that the legal system served imperial power, others that it helped trade and enterprise grow. This book revisits the debate with a careful analysis of the origin of property and contractual laws. It uncovers two distinct ways that laws emerged. On the one hand, with law on property, especially agricultural land, indigenous rules, local power, political expediency, and fiscal needs were more influential factors in the making of laws than were concepts borrowed from Europe. With commercial and corporate law, on the other hand, there was considerable borrowing from European legal theory. In all cases, the Raj struggled with insufficient knowledge of pre-existing norms, limited capacity to enforce its laws, and the enormous diversity and differentiation within Indian society. The chaotic course of legal evolution and limited state capacity made British Indian law a disorderly system, and a legacy of questionable value.

Industrial policy frequently seeks to alter an industry’s structure to better align the incentives faced by individual decision makers with the needs and desires of the industry’s consumers. For most industries no structure dominates that of free competition, and intermittent government policy seeks to increase competition. The economic and technical characteristics of electricity supply make such a structure impossible for the electric utility industry. Instead, government involvement has been continuous, not only as regulator, but as owner and operator of a significant proportion of the industry’s firms. The controversy over the best form of firm ownership dominated much of the public policy debate prior to 1940, and that controversy at times became intensely ideological and hardened. The structures created by public policy were always (perhaps inevitably) flawed and resulted in negative unforeseen consequences, revived political crises, and new policy-induced structural changes. This book provides considerable historical detail, providing the contexts of the political crises and the changing industry structures. History reveals many flaws in those structures, some of which were not and have not been fully recognized. The economics of electric utilities, such as the major dependence on investment in transaction-specific assets and the importance of the peak load, provide a framework for understanding the industry’s response to policy changes and for analyzing the historical debates that led to those changes.