Includes bibliographical references / The important role of institutions is relatively agreed on within the growth literature, with most empirical evidence pointing towards a positive influence of institutions on economic growth. However, empirical analysis of the institutions and growth nexus have faced a few problems, which include: the lack of a clear distinction between the different types of institutions; (i.e. political institutions, economic institutions, and customary institutions); a lack of long-run data measuring institutions for most of sub-Saharan Africa; and the paucity of country specific studies - the majority of the empirical evidence have mainly focused on cross-country analysis. While extensions from cross-country analysis to country specific analysis is growing, empirical studies focused on sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. Within the African context, majority of empirical evidence suggest weak institutions as one of the main causes of its poor economic performance. However, due to the paucity of long-run data on institutions, such an hypothesis has not been empirically tested for specific countries. Motivated by these gaps, this thesis contains three essays that examine three types of institutions and their impact on the economy. The specific issues focused on include: the evolution of institutions; persistence of institutions; interdependence between political and economic institutions; interdependence between institutions and economic development; and the role of institutions in determining resource wealth effects. This thesis uses Nigeria as a case study, because of its standing as one of the larger economies in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in terms of its natural resources. In addition to this, Nigeria has experienced numerous regime and constitutional changes over the past few decades which may lead to interesting institutional dynamics.

This thesis identifies the gaps in the literature on foreign aid, and tries to fill some of them focusing particularly on Niger, a country that has received aid since its independence in 1960, yet remains one of the world's poorest. The work contributes to the literature in three ways: First, it addresses moral hazard: the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the country is analysed through a historical case study. Niger's requests for assistance are accompanied by promises to undertake reforms; however, once aid is disbursed, these undertakings rarely materialize. Despite this record of poor (and deteriorating) compliance, IMF aid continues to flow, engendering perverse incentives and moral hazard. Secondly, it analyses whether aid is associated with poverty reduction. Aid is correlated with poverty, which is to be expected due to its pro-poor targeting nature. However, this study found increases in poverty associated with communities which were recipients of aid. To shed more light on this, households receiving aid were compared with those receiving no project assistance at all, and with households who benefited from non-aid based development projects. The results showed that changes in poverty levels among aid recipient households were not statistically different to those among households receiving no assistance. However, households benefiting from aid under-performed those who benefited from other projects. Thirdly, it explores whether aid brings utility to households through the provision of public goods. The results suggest that aid projects do help households. However, other sources of development projects are more efficient at doing so. Information is the key: it is a vital prerequisite for projects to address the needs of the population, and not all donors have the same information. Information can be obtained through co-funding projects with other donors, although there are also coordination costs. The models estimated allow the prediction of the benefits a project could provide to a household. Such predictive abilities could allow policymakers to coordinate donors' initiatives to maximize their effectiveness. However, at present Niger lacks the capacity to achieve such coordination. Furthermore, such an approach would involve having to reduce the least efficient donors to mere providers of finance (i.e. channel their resources through other donor types), a role they might not be willing to accept.

Includes bibliographical references / This thesis focuses mainly on three related issues of the broader new institutional economics and political economy research: (i) the evolution of formal economic and political institutions over time (ii) the causality between political institutions and economic institutions, and that between institutions and economic development; (iii) and the role of institutions on economic development through the channel of foreign direct investment, and on the control of rent seeking and corruption in Kenya. These issues are discussed in four distinct essays, each essay constituting an independent and self-contained chapter. It adopts the conceptual framework on institutions proposed by Douglass North. The central theme of the thesis across all chapters is the demonstration of how political players holding de-facto political power operating under weak political rights and civil liberties use legal operators to benefit themselves and their close associates. For instance, starting with British rule - protectorate period (1885-1920) and colonial period (1920-1963) - an extensive legal apparatus designed by those holding de-facto political power expropriated much of the land and redistributed it to themselves at the expense of the indigenous populations whose political rights and civil liberties were crossly undermined. However, even after independence, several political players in the newly independent Kenya made little effort to fundamentally change the colonial laws that governed land rights and could not as well promote strong political rights and civil liberties. The thesis argues that despite pressures from the populace, political leaders and their interest groups holding de-facto political power entrench themselves in the system under weakly institutionalized environment, and oppose the constitutional reforms by all means including force, since such reforms go against their interests. The delay in such reforms often leads to the breakdown of governance. Such breakdown inevitably leads to conflict and social crisis such as the Kenya post-election crisis of 2007. The chapters in the thesis are organized in such a way that they start by tracing the evolution of rights promoted by people holding de-facto political power, then later the remaining chapters take on the assessment and implications of how such rights promoted under weakly institutionalized environment affect economic outcomes.

The public school superintendent is seen as the leader of schools and as a spokesperson bridging schools and the community. With this thought in mind, along with reports suggesting school and business collaboration as the key to better schools and lasting economic growth, defining the school superintendent's role in local economic development becomes valuable. As school and business relationships change, superintendents must be prepared to address this evolving interdependence. The purpose of this study was to clarify the role of the public school superintendent in local economic development. Using a three-round Delphi technique, panelists representing various geographic locations and employment domains participated in developing a consensus on this role. Superintendents, economic development leaders, business leaders, and government officials individually identified the tasks important to the public school superintendent's responsibility in local economic development. Panel members then rated the level of importance of each suggested task and worked through the rounds to develop agreement using statistical feedback from the group response. The tasks agreed upon by 80% of the panel members as being important to extremely important were then examined to disclose the level of importance. The rating response mean and standard deviation were calculated for each task. These descriptive measures were then used to rank the most important tasks and better define the public school superintendent's role in local economic development. / Ed. D.

This research project examines the emergence of youth entrepreneurs in the moments just before mining and industrial activities develop within a community. It focuses on how young people engage with the hopes and promise of opportunities engendered by the expansion of mines and industry within a particular place. Using ethnography as methodology, it looks at how young people's dreams and desires in eSikhawini, a township in the Richards Bay area within the uMhlathuze Municipality, are activated by the coming of mining activities and how they use these to create entrepreneurs. In the context of mining and industrial expansion, young people use the promise of opportunity and the pursuit of dreams and desires to create particular kinds of entrepreneurs who attempt to stabilize their lives and that of their community in the face of precarity. It argues that the interrelations emergent in the daily enterprise of creating a stable future are key resources and insurance against uncertainty that sustain "community" in the context of eSikhawini. Overall, the thesis attempts to demonstrate that by recognising and strengthening youth entrepreneurs' capacity to aspire and realise their dreams can entrepreneurship interventions and programmes foster and sustain empowering relationships amongst marginalized people living in areas affected by mining and mineral beneficiation.

The implementation of privatization and Structural Adjustment Programs in Zambia saw the contribution of manufacturing in GDP significantly reduce from 37.2 percent in 1992 to 8.2 percent in 2013. Efforts to revamp manufacturing have not delivered to expectations and the industrial base has continued to be smaller than it used to be in the 1970s and 1980s. This has raised serious questions about suitable industrialization policies not only for Zambia but for other African countries as well. This study examines the agro-processing industry with a view to establish whether it can drive the development of Zambia's manufacturing. We start by exploring the growth opportunities and highlighting the key sectors of comparative advantage. Thereafter, we apply the Data Envelopment Analysis algorithm to construct measures of technical and scale efficiency for a sample of 115 firms using the 2011/2012 Economic Census data. Finally, we examine the effect of firm attributes on the firm's technical and scale efficiency using the Tobit regression model. The results reveal that there are sufficient growth opportunities in Zambia's agro-processing industry, but the industry is highly inefficient. The average technical efficiency was 42.5 percent while scale efficiency was 81.7 percent. The study also shows that firm efficiency is affected by firm size, the size of the firm's market share, labour costs, and location of the firm.

The mobile telecommunications industry continues to be at the epicentre for growth, innovation, and disruption for virtually all other industries. It is one of the keys to sustainable economic development especially in developing and emerging economies. Over the past two decades, the industry has been very dynamic, experiencing high growth rates. This paper uses econometric models to investigate the impact of market structure on market outcomes such as mobile prices and investment in emerging economies. This is done using quarterly panel data on fifteen emerging economies across four continents for the period between 2006 and 2015. The Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) and the number of operators are used to proxy market structure and effective price per minute paid by consumers and capital expenditure per subscriber are used to proxy mobile prices and investment respectively. Empirical results indicate that increase in market concentration increases market prices. Results also indicate an inverted-U relationship between market concentration and investment. These results indicate that there is a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency which means that competition in mobile telecommunications reduces both market prices and investments.

In South African cities institutional practices and market forces are seen to reinforce spatial divisions. This dissertation reflects on the relationship between location fixed resources, market forces and state intervention and how the interaction of these factors influence urban spatial outcomes. It first develops the underlying economic theory that could inform good planning practice and then illustrates how state-market relations have had an impact on urban spatial outcomes in South Africa's recent history. These insights are then used to describe the spatial development of Cape Town and identifies ineffective and counterproductive interventions and illustrate how economic theories and concepts can be used to inform good planning practice. It concludes with the direction for further research and collaboration between economists and planners to improve planning and policy making in South Africa's cities.

Nigeria is an oil-rich country, and one of the largest oil producers in the world, however, its economic and developmental statistics have consistently ranked among the worst in the world. This paradox is widely believed to be a result of the natural resource curse. The natural resource curse is a phenomenon attributed to the inverse relationship between economic growth rates and the natural resource abundance of countries, and several notions have been put forward as to the mechanism through which the curse arises. These notions are generally categorised as either market-based explanations or political economy-based explanations. However, market-based explanations rely on assumptions that often do not apply in developing countries such as Nigeria. Consequently, the literature has come to increasingly focus on political economy explanations, two of the most prominent of which are rent seeking, and domestic conflict and political instability. Therefore, this paper seeks to identify some the drivers of the curse in Nigeria by particularly assessing the influence that rent seeking and domestic conflict and political instability may have had on Nigeria's economic experience. Since much of the resource curse literature is based on quantitative analysis, this paper aims to extend the literature using a qualitative approach, which involves the process tracing of major events in Nigeria. This approach is motivated by the fact that qualitative analysis is better suited to the task of identifying crucial insights concerning underlying dynamics of a specific country. Furthermore, this paper uses the limited access order (LAO) framework to guide its analysis. This framework is useful given that it involves the analysis of rent distribution as a means of curbing violence. Therefore, overall, this paper focuses on deciphering how oil's impact on the nation's economic rent distribution contributes to Nigeria's economic performance. Rent distribution, which largely occurs through patronage and corruption in Nigeria, is analysed through two different dimensions: (i) Formal rent distribution, which is institutionalised, and which mainly involves examining oil influenced changes to the revenue allocation formula and (ii) less formal rent distribution, which primarily involves examining discretionary and covert rent distribution in the oil industry. Based on the analysis, this paper concludes that oil's impact on rent distribution contributes to Nigeria's substandard growth in two ways; directly and indirectly. Regarding the first dimension, the effect is indirect, as oil's impact on formal rent distribution becomes a driver of conflict, which in turn adversely affects the economy's growth performance. However, regarding the second dimension, the effect is more direct, because oil's impact on discretionary rent distribution leads to massive economic waste, which contributes to the suboptimal growth of Nigeria's economy. Overall, with the lack of good institutions that can limit the power of the federal government, and effectively enforce checks and balances in the oil sector, Nigeria's experience of conflict and economic underperformance will remain perpetual in nature.

Since the early 2000s, South Africa's once thriving sector started to whither due to a combination of domestic and international factors. The result was a sharp decline in manufacturing output, low productivity levels, factory closures and massive job losses across the sector. The blow to the industry was exasperated by the surge of cheap imports, both legal and illegal, primarily coming from China. The poor performance and consequent contraction of the industry had a profound impact on the predominately female workers. In recent years, however, the clothing industry has started to stabilise and is beginning to show positive trends in terms of performance and competitiveness. This paper therefore examines whether female workers have gained from the changes that have taken place in the industry, looking specifically at the Western Cape region. It finds that although the Western Cape clothing industry was the most severely hit by the challenges of global competition, it is now doing relatively well. Furthermore, it argues that the sector is upgrading and providing increased opportunities for women in terms of employment and skills development. This can be attributed to the changes in policy approach by government as well as new and improved production methodologies that are being adopted by firms. Moreover, it argues that the Cape Clothing and Textiles Cluster (CCTC) has played a critical role in driving these processes in the industry primarily through high level trainings and the exposure of executives to the latest industry developments, both nationally and internationally.