Not only do Africa's fragile states grow more slowly than non-fragile states, but they seem to be caught in a "fragility trap". For instance, the probability that a fragile state in 2001 was still fragile in 2009 was 0.95. This paper presents an economic model where three features -- political instabi...

This article summarizes the publication "Revisiting Gowth and Convergence: Is Africa Catching Up?" The neoclassical Solow framework has been the workhorse for empirical analysis of growth in industrial and developing countries. In this framework, steady state economic growth depends on exogenous techn...