Institutions and African Economies: An Overview

This article presents an overview of the current special issue ‘Institutions and African Economies’. The findings include: (1) greater prevalence of democratic regimes improved both agricultural productivity and the overall growth of African economies, consistent with ‘new institutionalism’; (2) higher institutional quality involving more binding constraints on the executive branch of government would raise economic growth via increased prevalence of ‘syndrome-free’ regimes; (3) in more democratic regimes, there is less corruption, but greater risk of conflict, from resource rents; (4) Nigeria represents a good illustrative case of the potentially corrosive nature of resource rents, with the policy implication that distributing the rents to the public might provide a solution to the resource-curse problem; and (5) while employment protection regulation does not appear consequential, greater difficulty in doing business results in less job growth in African manufacturing in the long term.