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This thesis is a study of the place of ‘party’ and different ways of understanding this phenomenon in eighteenth-century British political discourse, especially between 1714 and 1765. Party is one of the most basic concepts of politics. If we are looking for party in any form, the idea of partisan division may be at least as old as the earliest societies where there was competition for office. But what did ‘party’ mean in the eighteenth century? While ancient factions usually denoted interest groups representing different orders in the state, party in the eighteenth century had a range of meanings, some general and others more specific. Broadly speaking, it could either mean a parliamentary constellation vying for power, or carry the more sinister connotation of civil war-like division, with roots in the Reformation and its aftermath. In spite of the fact that the emphasis was on principles and beliefs rather than organisation in both cases, modern historians have tended to focus on the latter. The party debate was considered by political writers at the time to be profoundly important, and political life in the period simply cannot be understood without reference to party. Although ‘party spirit’ waxed and waned, ‘party’ was consistently a key word in political debate. By concentrating on the writings of Rapin, Bolingbroke, David Hume, John Brown, and Edmund Burke, in the context of political developments, this thesis presents the first sustained examination of the idea of party in eighteenth-century Britain. It demonstrates that attitudes towards party were more diverse, penetrating and balanced than previous research has managed to capture.

This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters on issues relating to the empirics of poverty and household analysis in Africa. The first analyses poverty at the country level, highlighting the diversity of experience in poverty reduction performance over the last few decades and assessing its causes. The other two studies are more methodological in their content, exploring how poverty and related issues can be analysed at the household level using existing survey data that pose difficulties as they do not track the same set of households over time. Chapter 2 highlights the fact that although growth has improved substantially in most African countries in recent years, poverty across the continent has fallen very little in the aggregate. Poverty reduction performance has varied across countries: there are apparently ‘two Africas’, one with an ability to reduce poverty and one without. The main argument is that one reason for this difference is rooted in colonial times. Countries with strong smallholder cash crop sectors emerged into independence with broad-based labour-intensive economies supporting a more equitable income distribution conducive to inclusive growth and poverty reduction compared to initially more inequitable mineral resource and large farm based economies. This did not necessarily determine the post-colonial path: many peasant export economies achieved no poverty reduction (often because of little growth), and some mine/plantation economies did achieve poverty reduction. The key reasons for this evolution lie in the motivation and ability of African elites to form pro-poor coalitions, which in some cases were then able to implement policies supporting a pro-poor pattern of growth. Chapter 3 focuses on pseudo-panel estimation and how it enables the estimation of panel models when only repeated cross-sections rather than panel data are available. It involves the grouping of individual into cohorts and using the cohort means as if they are observations in a genuine panel. The usual assertion is that as long as there are enough individuals within cohorts so that the cohort sample means are a good approximation of the cohort population means then pseudo-panel estimates are consistent, otherwise they may suffer from measurement error bias. We show that there can be substantial bias arising from the grouping process itself due to the loss of variation and heterogeneity as one moves from the individual to the cohort level. Thus we find many of the common methods used for grouping into cohorts produces inconsistent estimates. We develop some measures for assessing whether the cohort level data contains sufficient variation for pseudo-panel estimates to be consistent, focusing on the variation across cohort means, over time and within cohort groups. We then test the measures empirically and with Monte Carlo simulations, providing useful thresholds that can be used to accept or reject the cohort construction method. Chapter 4 assesses four different estimation methods of binary response models with individual effects where the data is a time-series of independent cross-sections. We compare Deaton’s (1985) linear fixed effects estimator, which is most often used in applied work, to three non-linear estimators. The first is a simplified version of Collado’s (1998) Minimum Distance estimator. The other two are based on the fractional response estimators developed by Wooldridge and Papke (2008) which, unlike Collado’s estimator, can be used for dynamic models as well. Results from Monte Carlo simulations and from an empirical application indicate the linear estimator is just as good as the other non-linear estimators and is generally more robust to problems arising from the process of creating the pseudo-panel.

Given the growing world population and income in emerging economies, increased demand for food and feed crops for the production of bio-fuels, and greater frequency and intensity of weather-related disasters in different parts of the world due to climate change, global food prices are expected to increase. Food importing developing countries are vulnerable to these price increases and associated price volatility as poor households would be the most severely affected. While there are extensive empirical studies on the effect of food price increases and volatility on household welfare in developed and developing countries, little is known about African countries. This thesis contributes to the literature on Africa, specifically Ghana using three waves of the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) to measure the effect of food price increases on household welfare between 1991 and 2013 and addressing the effect of price volatility with a measure of households’ willingness to pay for price stability. A number of contributions are made in this thesis. First, an application of both a parametric and non-parametric analysis to the GLSS shows that budget share equations require including a higher expenditure term to appropriately explain consumer behaviour; the non-linear Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System expenditure model is the best fit for the GLSS data. Second, an analysis of the consumption patterns of cereal and cereal products shows variation in consumption patterns across time and different groups of households. For example, bread is considered a necessity while maize was a luxury in 1991/92 and 1998/99 but a necessity in 2012/13, showing a case of where a commodity is a luxury at some point and a necessity at another time. Commodity groups such as root, tubers & plantain, meat, fish and oil & fat products are considered luxuries while bread & cereals are considered necessities. Third, welfare effects calculated for three periods of price changes show there are differences in magnitude for each period, and in all periods a higher proportion of poorer household food expenditure is needed to compensate for observed price increases than for non-poor households. However, within poorer households, we find that rural poor households suffered more from price increases than urban poor households. There are also significant regional differences in welfare effects across periods, with households in the Savannah zone suffering more from observed price changes in all periods. Finally, while the average rural household is a net producer of maize and millet but a net purchaser of rice, rural households are more price risk averse with respect to the price of rice. If substitution between the prices of maize, rice and millet are ignored, 13 per cent of income of the average rural household is required to stabilise prices of all three commodities. However, if substitution is allowed for, the average rural household will be willing to pay 9 per cent of income to stabilise the price of all three commodities at the same time. This suggests that ignoring substitution between prices lead to overestimation of household Willingness-To-Pay (WTP) to stabilise prices of maize, rice and millet in Ghana.

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This thesis comprises three self-contained essays on topics surrounding economic growth and macroeconomic performance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The first two address aspects of measurement error in macroeconomic data from SSA: the first essay (Chapter 2) explores the potential of nighttime luminosity as a means of improving GDP estimates, the second (Chapter 3) assesses the potential impact of changes in the data on empirical results from time series analysis. The third essay (Chapter 4) investigates exchange rate dynamics in Zambia, and how these pass through to consumer prices. The first essay (Chapter 2) explores heterogeneity in the nexus between nighttime light emissions and economic activity, a relationship that is increasingly exploited with the aim of reducing measurement error in growth estimates of countries where the data is considered weak. I show that the elasticity between nighttime lights and economic activity varies substantially across countries, and that this variation has a systematic component which could have implications for empirical results. Using the elastic net method in order to isolate the relevant factors, I find that 55% of the variation can be explained by observable factors. When tracing economic growth in Africa since 1992 using luminosity and accounting for the explained share of parameter heterogeneity, I find no evidence of an 'African Growth Miracle' as described by, e.g., Young (2012). However, I do find evidence that countries that recently revised their GDP figures (like Nigeria and Ghana) had a tendency to report inflated growth rates for recent years. This is consistent with Jerven (2014)'s hypothesis of purely 'statistical growth'. The second essay (Chapter 3) explores the inconsistencies across different versions and sources of national accounts data (three versions of the Penn World Table and the World Development Indicators), and their impact on macroeconomic inference from time series analysis. I use the statistical framework developed by Juselius et al. (2014) and assess the robustness of their conclusions regarding the long-run impact of foreign aid on economic growth in 36 SSA countries that are generally considered to have low statistical capacity, and where sources on macroeconomic variables sometimes disagree strongly. The results of this exercise are mixed: When I apply the Cointegrated VAR models precisely as developed by JMT to the new datasets, results remain robust for about two thirds of the countries. Once I re-specify the time series models based on the respective data (as different data will sometimes imply different lag lengths, cointegration ranks, etc.), using the same statistical methodology as JMT, this often leads to more substantial changes in the conclusions. The third essay (Chapter 4) investigates the dynamics between the exchange rate and consumer prices in a resource-rich setting in a case study of Zambia. Using a combination of short-run sign- and zero-restrictions, I identify relevant global and domestic shocks in a structural VAR (SVAR). The results suggest that the pass-through of the exchange rate to consumer prices (ERPT) depends greatly on the shock that originally caused the exchange rate to fluctuate. While, for instance, the price of copper is the most important driver of the exchange rate, the fluctuations caused by it tend to affect prices only moderately (an ERPT of ca. 7%). On the other hand, exchange rate fluctuations caused by monetary shocks come with a much higher pass-through of up to 25%.

At independence the emerging African elite was dominated by employees of the state. Many academics have since speculated that this over-reliance on public employment contributed to the continent’s poor economic performance, as resources extracted from society were captured by a rent-seeking public sector class. Because this elite was directly beholden to the state, it also lacked the independence needed to hold the political class to task. Was this diagnosis accurate and has the state’s role as a creator of the elite persisted? This dissertation explores how three East African governments –those of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda - have used their powers as the single largest employer in their respective countries to influence the structure of society. Using quantitative evidence, it traces how public employment and pay evolved between the 1960s and the present. It examines the effects of these changes on the economic standing of public sector employees and the educational, regional and ethnic backgrounds of the people who came to work for the state. This long-run perspective shows that the public services in all three countries have changed a great deal over the past half-century and suggests that public sector salaries have declined in importance for the region’s educational and income elites. It also reveals that public sector jobs have been more evenly distributed - on a regional, ethnic and gender basis - than is sometimes presumed. The thesis relates these findings to a rich political economy literature on public employment, social stratification and the development of the African postcolonial state.

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Privatisation has been a key policy in the late 20th century in many countries. In West Germany, the federal government sold most of its corporate industrial shareholdings to private investors between 1949 and 1989. Unlike many other countries, West Germany did not nationalise entire industries after the Second World War. Instead, the portfolio of public enterprises and participations was mainly an inheritance from the Third Reich. The aim of the thesis is to explore the causes of privatisation and the driving and delaying forces in the privatisation process between 1949 and 1989 based on qualitative historical documents. After the sale of participations stemming from the war economy in the early 1950s, the conservative federal government of CDU and CSU and later the conservative-liberal government of CDU, CSU and FDP under the Federal Chancellors Konrad Adenauer (CDU) and Ludwig Erhard (CDU) pursued a larger scale privatisation programme by issuing people's shares between 1959 and 1965. The programme featured social elements and aimed at the property formation of employees and a wide dispersion of shares in the society. In the 1970s, public enterprises expanded under a social-liberal government of SPD and FDP, until a conservative-liberal government of CDU, CSU and FDP under Federal Chancellor Kohl (CDU) sold most of the remaining federal participations in industrial enterprises between 1984 and 1989. The total volume of privatisation as measured by revenues remained modest compared to other West European countries and strong political resistance within the government parties CDU and CSU manifested in the process. Findings indicate a high continuity of thought and policy patterns from the 1950s until the end of the 1980s while the main reasons for privatisation shifted slightly. In the 1950s and 1960s, privatisation was primarily motivated by fiscal reasons - access to equity capital proved to be limited for the growing federal enterprises. Privatisation in the 1980s was caused by re-interpretations of the economic situation due to globally changing conditions and increased international competition. Hence, it can be interpreted as a lagged response to market crisis in the 1970s. Ideological shifts of paradigm did not drive privatisation. Rather, advocates of ordoliberalism focused on other economic reforms in the 1950s and liberal ideas in the 1980s co-developed with privatisation politics. For many decades, public enterprises were not viewed as ineffcient per se as long as they were operating in competitive markets. This perception only began to change slowly in the 1980s.

The concern of the thesis is to clarify the structural relevance between market areas and supply areas through the investigation of firm location under the given conditions of market demand, deposit of inputs and technologies for production. Conventional economic analysis studies a solid interaction between input and output, through the structure of the production function, by means of the duality theory in the input-output framework. This corresponds to the framework of market areas and supply areas in location theory. However, the existing market-area analysis and supply-area analysis focus examination on an independent framework, and a series of approaches has not been sufficiently developed. Although the integrated framework of both types of area would be treated as an extended version of the duality theory, the framework would not be complete unless the analysis took additional spatial factors into consideration. These factors are suggested to be parts of spatially unconstrained and constrained internal and external economies. The spatially constrained types of economies are called agglomeration economies and these, together with spatially unconstrained types of economies, constitute the neglected factors in existing market-area analysis and supply-area analysis. As agglomeration economies have a trade-off interaction with transportation costs, an analysis of assembly and distribution transportation costs is also required. This research clarifies these neglected factors and considers them with the duality theory, applying the input-output framework to both types of area analysis. This alternative approach not only demonstrates the effects of market area change on the spatial structure of supply area and vice versa, but also investigates the incentives governing the determination of the firm location.