International Political Economy: Some African Applications

Paul Collier

Journal of African Economies, vol. 17, issue suppl_1, -139

Abstract: Modern theories of political economy analyze the sources of political power and their uses for economic ends. The key instruments are taxation and regulation. Although international political economy treats states as its unit of analysis, the number of states is endogenous. This is highly pertinent for Africa, which has far more states relative to its population than other regions. Africa's many small states face acute difficulties of supplying the core public good of enforced justice and I apply the new economics of lawlessness developed by Dixit to show the consequences. I argue that due to the difficulties of supplying this key public good from within the state, Africa needs to have more recourse to the international provision: both through inter-state cooperation within the region, and through global provision. Copyright The author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejm032 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:17:y::i:suppl_1:p:-139

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().