Tanzania began its independence as a socialist country, but in the 1980s economic difficulties pushed it to adopt macroeconomic reforms, among them removing direct controls on prices and exchange and interest rates and opening up industry to private investment. Reforms intensified in the second half o...

To find out why African countries' experience with urbanization and sustained growth appeared to differ from that of other countries, the authors investigated the determinants of urbanization across countries over 40 years. Rather than studying individuals' decisions to migrate, they relied on macroeconomic data and cross-country comparisons. A central hypothesis o...