When it was published in 2002, the first edition of African Economic Development offered an authoritative statement about economic growth on the continent. Its multidisciplinary regional studies built an analytic framework that served as a cornerstone of the field for over a decade. The second edition offers a new collection of authoritative articles for a new age. In a sweeping survey of African economies, leading scholars offer the latest research into the biggest current influences on African growth and development, taking account of relevant institutional contexts as well as significant or unique problems that have slowed Africa's progress. Despite recognizing the factors that have resulted in underdevelopment, however, the contributors paint a hopeful picture of the efforts being made to overcome barriers, and they suggest that a significant reduction of poverty is possible in the near future. Each chapter singles out a particular problem-be it related to demography, geography, politics, climate change, agriculture, or industrialization-and proposes pragmatic solutions that put Africans' needs and capabilities first. Balancing theory and empiricism, and eschewing vague ideological or political language, this book provides an important vantage point from which to herald Africa's elusive dawn. For its rigorous scholarship, its unique breadth, and its actionable suggestions for the near future, the second edition of African Economic Development is a must-read for students, researchers, and practitioners of international development.

This volume considers current and future challenges for nature law and policy in Europe. Following the Fitness Check evaluation of the Birds and Habitats Directives, in 2017 the EU adopted an Action Plan for nature, people and the economy to rapidly improve the Directives' implementation and accelerate progress towards the EU's biodiversity targets for 2020. More recently, the EU has adopted a Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and proposed an EU Nature Restoration Law. This book makes a timely contribution by examining the current state of play in light of recent and historical developments, as well as the post-2020 nature law and policy landscape. While evidence suggests that Natura 2000 and the Habitats and Birds Directives have delivered conservation benefits for wildlife in Europe, biodiversity loss continues apace. The book reviews the requirements for an effective international nature conservation system, with reference to the Birds and Habitats Directives. It examines regulatory regimes, current legal issues in the fields of site protection and species protection, the protection of areas outside Natura 2000, recent developments in the EU and the UK, including the implications of Brexit, agriculture and nature conservation, litigation, science and access to justice. Written by leading experts in the field, from a range of stakeholder groups, the volume draws on diverse experiences as well as providing interdisciplinary perspectives. This volume will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in European environmental policy and law, including lawyers, ecologists, environmental scientists, political scientists, natural resource managers, and planners. It will also be of interest to conservation practitioners, policy-makers and NGOs.

Mental health has always been a low priority worldwide. Yet more than 650 million people are estimated to meet diagnostic criteria for common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, with almost three-quarters of that burden in low- and middle-income countries. Nowhere in the world does mental health enjoy parity with physical health. Notwithstanding astonishing medical advancements in treatments for physical illnesses, mental disorder continues to have a startlingly high mortality rate. However, despite its widespread neglect, there is now an emerging international imperative to improve global mental health and wellbeing. The UN's current international development agenda finalised at the end of 2015 contains 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG3, which seeks to ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages. Although much broader in focus than the previous eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the need for worldwide improvement in mental health has finally been recognised. This Handbook addresses the new UN agenda in the context of mental health and sustainable development, examining its implications for national and international policy-makers, decision-makers, researchers and funding agencies. Conceptual, evidence-based and practical discussions crossing a range of disciplines are presented from the world's leading mental health experts. Together, they explore why a commitment to investing in mental health for the fulfilment of SDG3 ought to be an absolute global priority.

This book analyses the diffusion and implementation of Aid Effectiveness Principles in Kenya's agricultural sector. Although Aid Effectiveness Principles represent a significant step in aid and development discourse, studies on its implementation remain inadequate, especially in the African context. This book combines the perspectives of the Kenyan government, donor representatives and small-scale farmers. The discussion on Kenya brings in comparative perspectives and, therefore, would have broader relevance to the African region, in general. It highlights a disconnect between the government and farmers concerning the ownership concept, where farmers lack a voice in important policy matters. The book shows that donors have exploited the weaknesses in government responses to interpret The Principles in ways that suit their strategic interests. Consequently, the book argues that the diffusion of Aid Effectiveness Principles has taken the form of symbolic imitation - a form of policy diffusion where the policymakers choose policies for their symbolic value rather than their effectiveness.

This book will provide a thematic overview of one of European history’s most devastating famines, the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s. In 1868, the nadir of several years of worsening economic conditions, 137,000 people (approximately 8% of the Finnish population) perished as the result of hunger and disease. The attitudes and policies enacted by Finland’s devolved administration tended to follow European norms, and therefore were often similar to the “colonial� practices seen in other famines at the time. What is distinctive about this catastrophe in a mid-nineteenth-century context, is that despite Finland being a part of the Russian Empire, it was largely responsible for its own governance, and indeed was developing its economic, political and cultural autonomy at the time of the famine. Finland’s Great Famine 1856-68 examines key themes such as the use of emergency foods, domestic and overseas charity, vagrancy and crime, emergency relief works, and emigration.

This edited volume explores the principle of solidarity in international and EU law. Although the concept is regularly invoked in international and EU legal and policy debates alike, its meaning, nature and functions, as well as normative contours still remain nebulous.The contributions in this volume reflect on the legal trajectory of solidarity in international and EU law and offer unique insights into the evolution and status of the principle in different fields of international and EU law. By doing so, the book also serves as a springboard for answering broader questions pertaining to what the stage of development of this principle may imply for the two legal orders and their interaction. As the chapters of this book show, the debate on solidarity is premised on conflicting visions regarding the values underpinning the international legal order as well as the self-interest or community-oriented driving forces behind States' action at the international level. The regional (EU law) perspective offers a new lens through which to revisit classic questions pertaining to the nature of modern international law and to assess its continuing relevance in a world of regional organizations presenting different visions (and levels) of co-operation. This book, the second volume to appear in the Global Europe Series, will appeal to international and EU law researchers and policy-makers alike with an interest in the nature and function of the principle of solidarity in international and EU law. Eva Kassoti is Senior researcher in EU and International Law at the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague, The Netherlands and the Academic Co-ordinator of CLEER. Narin Idriz is Researcher in EU Law at the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague, The Netherlands.

This book focuses on the analysis of transportation economics development with spatiotemporal characteristics in both theory and practice. The comprehensive and general theory development, practical transportation events and policy implications are addressed. The book pursues three main objectives: firstly, to structurally describe the overall spatiotemporal transportation theory development; secondly, to break down transportation elements and transportation modes into railway, highway, water, civil aviation, pipeline and urban transportation for the purposes of in-depth professional analysis; and thirdly, to summarize transportation trends including car-hailing, shared bicycles, etc., in China to reveal their policy implications.

The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s have witnessed the disintegration of all three formerly communist federal nations, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. These events have resulted in the creation of 22 new nations, raising all sorts of interesting questions. This volume is concerned with the first steps toward economic independence of a selection of these states, including Estonia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia, as well as the former Yugoslavia republics of Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia, and Slovakia. While their experiences vary greatly, they face common problems, making policy selections from a fairly similar menu. The papers in this collection provide considerable insight into the prerequisites of economic independence. Researchers, scholars, and students (graduate and upper level undergraduate classes) of economics, economic and regional development, and economic history should find this book of considerable value.

In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedoms and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. By asking 'What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we would like?' and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the Thai migrant community in Hong Kong between 2016 and 2020, this book provides original insights into the complexity and diversity of identity negotiation, ethnicity navigation, and womanhood reinvention of Thai migrant women in Hong Kong. Allowing research to move beyond standard stories of victimized migrants and domestic workers by focusing on the increasing number of Southeast Asians moving into the middle-class, this ethnographic study of the everyday lived experience of Thai migrant women in Hong Kong will advance a new understanding of transnational migration and mobility at the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class, generation, and religion. This book illustrates the influence of transnationalism and multiculturalism on migrant women's meaning-making and accentuates the importance of diversity within a migrant population - in particular, the importance of maintaining an intersectional perspective to understand the broader phenomenon of contemporary middle-class and professional migration within Southeast Asia.

With the fall of apartheid in South Africa, expectations were high for the enfranchisement of the acutely underdeveloped majority in South Africa. But problems abound, and this educational study looks critically at the educational situation and puts forth a number of proposals that could produce better results in contemporary South Africa.

Abdi urges that beyond the celebratory platforms of the political triumph over apartheid, there must be effective and culturally inclusive programs of education for the development of the highly disenfranchsed majority in South Africa.

Deliberate programs of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa resulted in inferior education, cultural marginalization, political oppression, economic exploitation and resulting underdevelopment in the lives of the disenfranchised majority. In addition to historical and contemporary analysis, this study looks at the possibilities of formulating and implementing new programs of education and development that could effectively deal with such current problems as chronic unemployment, skyrocketing crime rates, stagnating learning systems, and the continuing formations of a huge underclass that may be losing its stake in the promised post-apartheid project.

The agricultural sector's perceived importance in the international development circle waned dramatically after the 1980s, and investments in rural development and agricultural research and development declined sharply. This volume reasserts the role of agricultural and rural development in the economic development debate. By revisiting the evolution of ideas, paradigms and empirical evidence, and by drawing on Asian experiences, the book intends to set a reinvigorated agenda on agricultural and rural development both for research and policy discussions in the coming decades. Written by internationally acknowledged research scholars, this book is helpful to a wide range of audience, including researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and students interested in rural development in Asia and its future evolutions.

This book is about the role of the mosque in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. Disasters give rise to a situation where people from different parts of the world, quite unfamiliar with each other, come into contact to save lives, provide necessities such as food and shelter, rebuild homes and enable community recovery. During these challenging times, community-based religious institutions such as churches, mosques and temples are a practical choice for reaching people living nearby to fulfil their needs. The book shows the contributions of the mosque as a physical, spiritual and social place for improving the knowledge and practice of disaster risk reduction and management including the COVID-19 pandemic. It also illuminates the widening role of religion in development. The book reinforces the case for broader engagement with all community-based religious institutions. The book is of interest to academics in diverse fields including development studies, disaster studies, sociology, anthropology, religion, Asian studies, emergency and disaster management. It will also of interest to the professional staff of disaster management authorities, public sector, bilateral and multilateral aid allocation and implementing agencies and those of humanitarian organizations.

This book presents a snapshot of a major challenge, and shares subjective views on various areas of conflict in Africa and the diverse - theoretical and practical - efforts to achieve peace. Following an essential review of several real-world conflict contexts on the African continent and attempts to come to terms with them critically as a first step, the book explores the lessons learned to date with regard to peace studies in Africa.

This volume makes a comprehensive assessment of the status and quality of early educational experiences at preschool and early primary grades in India. It raises a serious concern that despite high enrolment in preschools, children's school readiness levels remain low at ages five and six, and raises a vital question---are Indian children getting a sound foundation for school and for later life? It addresses three important issues from the Indian perspective: children's school readiness at age five; families' readiness for school; and, most importantly, the readiness of schools for children. India is one of many countries across the global South facing an early learning crisis. High quality early childhood education may be key to improving these outcomes for children, yet little is known about early childhood education programs in India and their impact on children's school readiness. This volume is based on a longitudinal, mixed methods research study which is perhaps the first of its kind in India. The study covers public provisions along with steadily expanding private pre-schools and schools in rural India and provides interesting narratives and insights into the multiple pathways children are adopting in these critical early years, particularly in the context of the expanding role of the private sector. Written in a lucid and narrative style, this volume is of interest to a diverse readership of researchers, educationists and early childhood education policy makers and practitioners in terms of both its design and findings.

Governments worldwide are seeking to liberalize agricultural trade, and to change their role from one of controlling trade and prices. Instead these governments seek new roles in encouraging market developments, ensuring quality, and providing food security by giving income assistance rather than controlling food supplies. The issue of how this process is being managed in developing countries is the focus of this book. A series of case studies including India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Ivory Coast highlights the individuality of approaches and the varying capability and will of governments to take on these new roles.

This is an academic inquiry into how labor power has been dehumanized and commodified around the world through the ages for capital accumulation and industrialization, and colonial and post-colonial economic transformation. The study explores all major episodes of slaveries beginning from the ancient civilizations to the end of Transatlantic Slave Trade in the eighteenth century; the worlds of serfdoms in the context of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia; the worlds of feudalisms in the context of Latin America, Japan, China, and India; the worlds of indentured servitudes in the context of the Europeans, the Indians, and the Chinese; the worlds of guestworkers in the contexts of the United States and Western Europe; the worlds of migrant labor programs in the context of the Gulf States; and the contemporary world of neoslavery focusing on human trafficking in both developing and developed countries, and forced labor in global value chains. The book is designed not only for students and academia in labor economics, labor history, and global socio-economic and political transformations, but also for the intelligent and inquiring policy makers, reformers, and general readers across the disciplinary pursuits of Economics, Political Science, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and Law.

The book analyses the management of the internal displacement caused by activities of Boko Haram's terrorist insurgence in Nigeria. With over 3.1m persons displaced, the humanitarian crisis is at teeter ends with acute malnourishment, inadequate wash and non-relief materials, improper hygiene facilities, and lack of access to basic relief aid for displaced persons. The array of humanitarian organisations belies the concrete living conditions of displaced persons and calls to question the huge resources assumed to be expended on managing the humanitarian crisis in the northeast of Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin in general. Based on ethnographic research in IDP camps, the book chronicles the concrete living conditions of displaced persons and argues that IDPs in Northeastern Nigeria have been victimised first by Boko Haram's terrorism, and then victimised again by inefficient, un-coordinated, and unsuitable displacement management programs. This book also explicate the roles played by the Nigerian government and international aid agencies in managing this displacement, vis-a-vis a comparative analysis of similar, but better managed displacement situations in Kenya, Lebanon, and Turkey.

The main thrust of this book is to address a number of manpower issues vital to the development of the Persian Gulf region. By taking a long-run perspective, the study creates a framework for the development of future manpower policies in the key countries: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Iran, and Iraq. The past policies in the region of growth-related investment, industrialization, and economic development should not be given priority over development-related human resource issues. Furthermore, the pressing need to accommodate demands for more highly skilled national manpower should not occur at the neglect of the region's culture and values.

Conventional wisdom has it that government management of the economy is the means to transform a backward economy into a dynamic, modern one. Yet, after decades of international aid programs, development planning is today largely perceived as a failure paralyzed by its own bureaucracy and inefficiency. Despite billions of dollars of investment, development successes are few and far between and waste and mismanagement abounds.

This book showcases a diverse range of development experiences in order to ascertain the reasons for this quagmire. Case studies of development planning in China, India, post-WWII Japan, South Korea, Africa, and Eastern Europe, and of foreign aid programs (including the Marshall Plan) illustrate the insights an Austrian approach provides toward an understanding of the failure of government development planning. While economists working within the Austrian tradition have previously addressed development issues, this volume represents the first full-length treatment of the subject from a modern market process perspective. Exploding the hegemony of the traditional development paradigm, The Collapse of Development Planning addresses one of the most pressing issues of international political economy.

Contributing to the volume are: George Ayittey (American University), Wayne T. Brough (Citizens for a Sound Economy, Washington, DC), Young Back Choi (St. John's University), Steven Hanke (Johns Hopkins University), Steve Horwitz (St. Lawrence University), Shyam J. Kamath (California State University, Hayward), Shigeto Naka (Hiroshima City University), David Osterfeld (St. Joseph's College), Manisha Perera (University of Northern Colorado), Jan S. Prybyla (Pennsylvania State University), Ralph Raico (State University College, Buffalo), Parth Shah (University of Michigan, Dearborn), Kurt Schuller (Johns Hopkins University), Kiyokazu Tanaka (Sophia University, Tokyo), and Mark Thorton (Auburn University).

This book examines women, money, and political participation in the Middle East and North Africa focusing on women's capacity to engage local political systems. In particular, it considers whether and how this engagement is facilitated through specific types of financial flows from abroad. Arab countries are well-known rentier states, and so a prime destination for foreign aid, worker remittances, and oil-related investment. Alongside other factors these external monies have elicited dramatic shifts in gender-related social norms and expectations both from the state and the domestic population, affording certain women the opportunity to enter the political arena, while leaving others behind. The research presented here expands the discussion of women in rentier political economy and highlights their roles as participants and agents within regional templates for economic development.

This book provides a thorough introduction to and examination of agricultural value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa. First, the authors introduce the economic theory of agri-food value chains and value chain governance, focusing on domestic and regional trade in (and consumption of) food crops in a low-income country context. In addition to mainstream and heterodox thinking about value chain development, the book pays attention to political economy considerations. The book also reviews the empirical evidence on value chain development and performance in Africa. It adopts multiple lenses to examine agricultural value chains, zooming out from the micro level (e.g., relational contracting in a context of market imperfections) to the meso level (e.g., distributional implications of various value chain interventions, inclusion of specific social groups) and the macro level (underlying income, population and urbanization trends, volumes and prices, etc.).Furthermore, this book places value chain development in the context of a process the authors refer to as structural transformation 2.0, which refers to a process where production factors (labor, land and capital) move from low-productivity agriculture to high-productivity agriculture. Finally, throughout the book the authors interpret the evidence in light of three important debates: (i) how competitive are rural factor and product markets, and what does this imply for distribution and innovation? (ii) what role do foreign investment and factor proportions play in the development of agri-food value chains in Africa? (iii) what complementary government policies can help facilitate a process of agricultural value chain transformation, towards high-productive activities and enhancing the capacity of value chains to generate employment opportunities and food security for a growing population.

This edited volume examines the leadership and legacy of Ghana's Jerry John Rawlings within the broader context of Africa's leadership and democratic governance. The central purpose of the book is threefold. First, it examines the role and place of good and effective political leadership in the development of Africa. Second, it situates Jerry Rawlings' political style and legacy in the annals of democratic governance in post-independence Africa. Finally, the book adds to the knowledge and understanding of former President Rawlings as one of Africa's preeminent and transformational political leaders. Taking an interdisciplinary and Pan-African approach, this volume will be of great interest to scholars, policymakers, and students of African politics, African studies, governance, political leadership, democracy, development studies, and political economy.

This timely monograph focuses on India and Brazil's use of compulsory licensing, one of the most significant and controversial TRIPS flexibilities. This is a topical work at this critical time when the COVID-19 has stirred up the debate about compulsory licensing and access to medicines. A closer look into the historical use of compulsory licences in certain countries can offer some takeaways for the current situation. The author studies historical developments and political conditions of the patent system and compulsory licensing from the earliest stage to the modern arena, with a great emphasis on TRIPS. After conducting a cross-national study of India and Brazil, the book moves on to evaluate the different philosophies on compulsory licensing of multilateral organizations such as the EU, the WIPO, the WTO, and NGOs. This important book will strongly appeal to intellectual property students, academics, policymakers, and lawyers practicing in the area. It will also be of interest to academics working in the areas of international law, development, and public health as well as state actors and others with relevant concerns working in multilateral organizations.

This open access edited volume critically examines a coherence building opportunity between Climate Change Adaptation, the Sustainable Development Goals and Disaster Risk Reduction agendas through presenting best practice approaches, and supporting Irish and international case studies. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted existing global inequalities and demonstrated the scope and scale of cascading socio-ecological impacts. The impacts of climate change on our global communities will likely dwarf the disruption brought on by the pandemic, and moreover, these impacts will be more diffuse and pervasive over a longer timeframe. This edited volume considers opportunities to address global challenges in the context of developing resilience as an integrated development continuum instead of through independent and siloed agendas.