I am a PhD candidate at American University in Washington, DC. I am interested in state formation and governance in low income countries. My dissertation examines the influence of foreign aid on incumbent advantage in African presidential elections.Wikileaks – China, the US and Africa
Deborah Brautigam and I wrote a short article for African Arguments on what the leaked US embassy cables reveal about relationships between the US, China, and various African countries. Check it out.
Growth seems to be a very good way to decrease poverty in Africa.
(via Owen Barder)
African Growth Rates, 1996-2005
From Roving Bandit, who found it on Global Dashboard, who got it from the World Bank (.pdf).
*Unhappy thoughts means some combination of foreign aid, immigration and refugees, civil war and guerrilla warfare, terrorism, “war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity” (all one category), famine, drought, or AIDS.
Over the whole period, this collection of negative topics averaged 28% of total articles on the continent.
Again, the tagging system that the Times uses is opaque, the tags are vague, and most importantly, it seems like a lot of articles with “Africa” as the location tag lack desciptive tags (like “famine” or “ponies”). In short, be skeptical of the graph’s validity.
The graph above shows some of data mentioned here broken down by year. As I mentioned the last time I used these stats, articles tagged “Africa” are on the continent and do not include articles on individual countries within Africa. If you are comparing this graph to the one on Somalia keep in mind that the scale of both axes has changed.
