Can Western Aid Help Africa?
A symposium sponsored by NYU in London, an affiliate of New York University, to be held 6-7:30 pm Thursday, 6 March, in Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1. Followed by a buffet reception and drinks. ALL WELCOME.
The symposiasts will be:
- William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University, where he is also affiliated with the Africana Studies program and co-director of the Development Research Institute. He is Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development. He previously worked for 16 years as a research economist at the World Bank. He is author of the book The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001), as well as of numerous academic articles. He has lived and travelled in many places around the world, most intensively in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. Professor Easterly will discuss a long list of development panaceas that failed in Africa: foreign aid, structural adjustment lending, schooling, family planning, debt relief, etc., and suggest the way forward is to put in place institutions that give individuals incentives and opportunities to invest in their own prosperity.
- Dr. Francis Teal is a deputy director at the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) at the University of Oxford. The CSAE is part of the Department of Economics He has been working at Oxford since the Centre was founded in 1991. His research has focused primarily on micro analysis of both firms and households. He has been closely involved with an ESRC funded research program designed to improve the knowledge of how both labour and capital markets work in Africa. He has also worked on issues of trade and growth comparing the African experience with that of other regions. Dr. Teal will cover some of the same issues as those raised by William Easterly but focused on one country, Ghana. Why has performance in Ghana been so poor since independence? Was this the result of the colonial legacy, as many argue, or was it due to the policy choices made by the first post-independence government? He will then outline if there are general lessons from Ghanaian history as to why the African continent has been in crisis for many years and assess what the international community can do to alleviate the problems.
- Leonard Wantchekon is Associate Professor of Politics, Economics and African Studies at NYU. A native of Benin in West Africa, Professor Wantchekon taught at Yale University (1995 - 2000), and was a visiting fellow at the Center of International Studies at Princeton University (2000-2001). He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University and his M.A. in Economics from the University of British Columbia. Professor Wantchekon is the author of several articles on democratization and political economy of development in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution and Constitutional Political Economy. He has completed a book on Post Civil War democratization and is currently conducting a field experiment on clientelistic politics and voting behavior in several African Democracies. He is the new editor of the Journal of African Finance and Economic Development (JAFED). He will argue that development failure in Africa is the combined effect of political instability due to mismanaged domestic and regional conflicts and some incentives problems created by dependence on natural resources and foreign aid. Wantchekon will use the similarities between problems with welfare state in developed countries and foreign aid to developing countries