It has been argued that the fundamental cause of Africa’s current relative poverty is a lack of pro-growth institutions deriving either from the colonial system, the period of slavery, or from particular geographic or population characteristics. This article takes a fresh look at estimates of African country incomes. It subjects the available datasets to tests of accuracy, reliability, and volatil

Given shortcomings in basic data collection and insufficient resources in preparing official statistics African growth data are unlikely to be very reliable. Estimates of an annual growth rate of 3 per cent may be consistent with a reality between 0 and 6 per cent growth. Although data from international databases are widely used in an expanding literature on African growth there has been no resea

Botswana has figured widely as the exceptional African growth success story and has been frequently cited in scholarship that supports the view that African and other less developed economies are capable of rapid economic growth as long as the internal institutional framework and development policies are right. A shortcoming of the literature on African economic performance to date is that it has

Africa has not suffered a chronic failure of growth. In fact, Africa has experienced recurring periods of growth, and this paper reviews some of these growth “spurts” to substantiate that claim. The immediate cause of low income in Africa is that these “spurts” have always been followed by a ‘‘bust’’. This is a significant reorientation of the central research question – away from a search for the

Cross-sectional studies of growth in post-colonial Africa have overwhelmingly focussed on explaining the failure of growth in Africa. This prompting stylised fact has its qualifications and when these are taken into consideration the explanations of African economic growth appear incoherent. The notion of a chronic African growth failure has diverted attention from the process of economic growth a

For a long time Kenya was the African exception – a country that embraced a capitalist path to development in the midst of widespread state-led development. More recently it has been used as one of many examples of neopatrimonial rule in Africa, following its reputation for endemic corruption and its failure to successfully embrace economic and political reforms. Most interpretations of Kenya's ec

This article traces how African incomes have been measured through history, and shows that there has been a conflict of aims between producers and users of national income estimates. Politicians and international organizations seek income measures that reflect current political and economic priorities and achievements. Thus the importance given to markets, the state, and peasants in the estimates

Statistics on African economic growth are widely known to be inaccurate, but the extent and nature of these inaccuracies and their implications for the users of the data have not been rigorously assessed. This article investigates measurement issues of economic growth in post-colonial Tanzania. It is shown here that conclusions on Tanzania's development performance are conditioned by selection of

This review article examines the differences in the approaches taken by economists and historians when interpreting social and economic change in the African past. It is argued that it is a mistake to assume that one discipline has supremacy over the other, let alone monopoly, when it comes to evaluating historical causes of African poverty. One of the shortcomings of the ‘New African Economic His

If we take recent income per capita estimates at face value, they imply that the average medieval European was at least five times ‘better off’ than the average Congolese today. This raises important questions regarding the meaning and applicability of national income estimates throughout time and space, and their use in the analysis of global economic history over the long term. This article asks

Using data from a genome-wide association study of 907 individuals with childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (cases) and 2,398 controls and with validation in samples totaling 2,386 cases and 2,419 controls, we have shown that common variation at 9p21.3 (rs3731217, intron 1 of CDKN2A) influences acute lymphoblastic leukemia risk (odds ratio = 0.71, P = 3.01 x 10(-11)), irrespective of cell linea

Recent genome-wide association data have implicated genetic variation at 7p12.2 (IKZF1), 10q21.2 (ARIDB5), and 14q11.2 (CEBPE) in the etiology of B-cell childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). To verify and further examine the relationship between these variants and ALL risk, we genotyped 1384 cases of precursor B-cell childhood ALL and 1877 controls from Germany and the United Kingdom. The

BACKGROUND: The explosion in biological information creates the need for databases that are easy to develop, easy to maintain and can be easily manipulated by annotators who are most likely to be biologists. However, deployment of scalable and extensible databases is not an easy task and generally requires substantial expertise in database development.RESULTS: BioBuilder is a Zope-based software t

The rapid pace at which genomic and proteomic data is being generated necessitates the development of tools and resources for managing data that allow integration of information from disparate sources. The Human Protein Reference Database (http://www.hprd.org) is a web-based resource based on open source technologies for protein information about several aspects of human proteins including protein

Linkage between behavioral states and neural activity is one of the most important challenges in neuroscience. The network activity patterns in the awake resting state and in the actively behaving state in rodents are not well understood, and a better tool for differentiating these states can provide insights on healthy brain functions and its alteration with disease. Therefore, we simultaneously

All motile organisms need to organize their motor output to obtain functional goals. In vertebrates, natural behaviors are generally composed of a relatively large set of motor components which in turn are combined into a rich repertoire of complex actions. It is therefore an experimental challenge to investigate the organizational principles of natural behaviors. Using the relatively simple locom