FDI,democracy and corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper investigates the relationship between FDI, democracy and corruption among 30 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the period of 1985–2014 to determine whether the ‘helping hand’ or ‘grabbing hand’ hypothesis is most applicable. The results of GMM analysis show that corruption is used by FDI investors to overcome the region’s weak democratic regulatory and institutional status and thus the ‘helping hand’ is more prevalent. However, the results further show that as democratic capital accumulates, this association may outlive its usefulness and thus corruption as a ‘helping hand’ in time becomes a ‘grabbing hand’ instead. These results imply that SSA countries should focus on integrating into the international economy so as to take advantage of existing financial enforcement legislation while reconstructing and strengthening domestic constitutional anti-corruption legislation and institutions.     

Global liberalization on homosexuality: Explaining the African gap

We are trapped in two divergent worlds when it comes to global views on homosexuality. There is the liberal world epitomized by Spain and other nations, where homosexuality is increasingly accepted; gays and lesbians are claiming their human rights; and laws are changing to codify that transformation. The second is the extremely anti-gay world symbolized by Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia, where attitudes are favorable to criminalization. This research explains the “African Gap” in attitudes toward homosexuality in a comparative analysis of six African nations and Argentina and Canada, South and North America's most liberal nations on gay rights. Using Pew's 2015 Spring Global Attitudes Survey data, we find that the major variables have essentially similar effects on opinion in any context. Africa's distinction is explained by its comparatively higher levels of factors such as religion, morality dogma, and low socioeconomic status that generally retard support for homosexuality, at the same time of lower levels of factors such as education, urbanization, and personal liberty that increase gay support. Africa's extreme anti-gay outlook is mutable. Two social forces will facilitate this softening: expansion of liberalizing agents such as education and urbanization, and repositioning away from “traditionalism” toward modernism emphasizing individualism, civil rights, and personal liberties.     

Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow

ABSTRACT

Drawing on social histories of rumour, this article challenges notions of white and Afrikaner homogeneity which persist in the scholarship on late and post-apartheid South Africa. In so doing, it demonstrates the revisionist potential of rumour as a historical source, while reinserting class in a scholarship which privileges race as salient historical feature. The article focuses on Arrie Paulus, apartheid South Africa’s most prominent white trade unionist, infamous as the personification of working-class racism. Yet this defender of race-based privilege and staunch Afrikaner nationalist was haunted by a rumour: Paulus, it was whispered, was not actually white. The rumour circulated in reform-era South Africa and persists in the post-apartheid present. By examining the rumour surrounding Paulus’s racial and ethnic origins in terms of the functions it fulfilled within the particular contexts in which it appeared, this article exposes longstanding tensions around the politics of class characterizing Afrikaner society since the 1970s.     

Myths and realities about input subsidies in sub‐Saharan Africa

Using a recent public expenditure dataset, this article proposes a ‘reality check’ of the level and composition of input subsidies in nine African countries between 2006 and 2013. Results show that input subsidies (1) received close to 35% of agricultural‐specific expenditure on average and (2) cover a variety of interventions, including investments in capital, such as on‐farm irrigation, and in on‐farm services, such as inspection or training. Further, the figures show that input subsidies tended to become entrenched in agricultural budgets over time, leading to sub‐optimal execution rates, and were primarily funded by the national taxpayer, while donors invested more in public goods. Findings confirm that input subsidies crowded out other spending categories likely to be more supportive of long‐term agricultural development objectives. The article concludes that the political economy of input subsidies should be directed to making more concrete efforts to attain a better balance of public expenditure on agriculture. Furthermore, policy‐makers should aim to increase the efficiency and policy coherence of input subsidies, since merely abolishing them is likely to be unfeasible in the short term.     

Unruly Voices in the Museum

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use of audio recordings and oral memory for the critical engagement with colonial pasts in ethnographic museums by focusing on the traveling exhibition What We See, curated by Anette Hoffmann (2009). Specifically, it draws on Jeffrey Feldman's notion of colonial “contact points,” i.e. material traces of colonial encounter, to highlight the exhibition's ability to convey and critique the sensory experience of colonial contact. In What We See, this colonial contact consisted in an anthropometric project conducted in South-West Africa, today's Namibia, in 1931, resulting in an archive of anthropometric measurements and photographs, life-casts, and phonographic recordings. The exhibition proposed an innovative way of reworking this archive by staging an intricate interplay between sound and sight, thereby disrupting conventional ocularcentric forms of display. However, this multisensory approach provoked highly divergent reactions at its various exhibition venues. This article argues that the divergent reactions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Vienna, Austria, were due to different levels of what Ann Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”—that is the context-dependent difficulty of addressing disquieting colonial pasts and its sensory dimensions.     

Urban “slums” and social mobility

Informal urban settlements determine the wellbeing of a large section of global humanity. Yet there has been little research on their role in facilitating social mobility. In theory such settlements may foster human progress by linking rural–urban migrants to the services, contacts and livelihoods concentrated in cities. The article uses longitudinal data for South Africa to explore the magnitude of social progression among people living within informal settlements compared with rural areas and formal urban areas. It finds that there may be some advantage from living in an informal settlement compared with a rural area, but the effect is not strong. The impact may be larger in the more prosperous Gauteng city‐region than in other urban regions.     

Revenue Mobilisation in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Challenges from Globalisation I – Trade Reform

This is the first of two articles evaluating the nature and extent of, and possible responses to, two of the central challenges that globalisation poses for revenue mobilisation in sub‐Saharan Africa: trade liberalisation, and corporate tax competition. Both articles use a new dataset with the features needed to address these issues meaningfully: a disentangling of tariff from commodity tax revenue, and a distinction between resource‐related and other revenues. This first article describes that dataset, and provides a broad picture of revenue developments in the region between 1980 and 2005. Countries’ experiences have varied, but the overall picture is of non‐resource revenues having been essentially stagnant. Within this, however, and with exceptions, reductions in trade tax revenue have been largely offset by increased revenue from domestic sources.     

Double‐mouthed discourse: Interpreting,framing, and participant roles1

In this article I examine multilingual displays in a Congolese Pentecostal church in Cape Town, South Africa. I focus on the simultaneous interpreting of the pastor's French sermon into English. I argue that the interpreting activity performed at church is used as a powerful interactional device to dramatize and shape the pastor's sermon. A close examination of participant roles shows that although these may appear to be predetermined by the interpretee‐interpreter format of the sermon, speaking roles are actually fluid and negotiated. I submit that an important role of the church interpreter is to convey the pastor's inspiration from the Holy Spirit and reach out to the potential audience absent from the here and now of the service. His high emotional engagement helps convey this inspiration prospectively to the audience and retroactively to the pastor himself.     

Public Debt Sustainability in Africa: Building Resilience and Challenges Ahead

The increased access of African countries to international capital markets has put public debt sustainability at the forefront of the continent's policy agenda. Utilising the ‘stabilising primary‐balance’ approach, this article finds that the actual primary balances exceeded those required to keep public debt at the 2007 level in about half the countries studied, and in several cases, those needed to reduce public debt‐to‐GDP to sustainable thresholds. The interest rate‐growth differential (IRGD) drove sustainability, underscoring the importance of growth and borrowing for growth‐enhancing outlays. As the IRGDs are likely to narrow over the longer term, fiscal policies will need to play a greater role.