These essays are taken from the many symposiums diagnosing Nigeria's prolonged stagnation. The book is designed as a companion to the author's previous book Managing Uncertainty: Competition and Strategy in Emerging Economies which won the Boshorun M.K.O. Abiola prize as the best academic book published in Nigeria in 1998. The five parts of the book are Strategy and the Nigerian Environment; The Environment of Banking and Finance; Political Economy Issues and the Macro-economy; Challenge to Business; Budget Reviews and Policy Advocacy; Values and Management Effectiveness; and Case Studies.

The inadequacies of many past studies that have tried to highlight the causes of the persistent underdevelopment in developing countries—such as Nigeria—have been noted to derive mainly from the focus and, in some cases, the methodologies adopted by the researchers. It has been suggested that, although many researchers recognize the inability to reproduce sufficient profit as undermining the capitalist accumulation process (and as a result the development of an economy), they have nevertheless often tended to ignore the importance of the political-economic arrangement and historical factors in the formation of expectations about the rate of profit. Indeed, in some cases, they have failed to provide a substantive account of these critical variables. This book highlights how the inherent contradictions of the contemporary political-economic arrangement and some historical factors undermined the peculiar capital accumulation processes in Nigeria, which, in turn, has slowed economic development in the country. This book contributes to the field of Nigeria studies by filling gaps that exist in both theoretical and empirical literature on growth and development in the country, deviating from the orthodox approach of analysing the nation’s problems purely based on the factors internal to the country and by imposing ready-made theoretical logics on history. Rather, it studies Nigeria’s problems in juxtaposition with the world system and imposes historical evidence on theoretical logics. This book represents a good resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses on area studies. Researchers and policy-makers will also find it useful as a reference.

This volume presents eight good practice examples of problem-driven political economy analysis conducted at the World Bank, and reflect what the Bank has so far been able to achieve in mainstreaming this approach into its operations and policy dialogue.

The political economy problems of Nigeria, the root cause for ethnic, religious, political and economic strife, can be in part addressed indirectly through focused contributions by the U.S. military, especially if regionally aligned units are more thoroughly employed.

An introduction to the politics and society of post-colonial Nigeria, highlighting the key themes of ethnicity, democracy, and development.

Rents to Riches> focuses on the political economy of the detailed decisions that governments make at each step of the natural resource management (NRM) value chain. Many resource-dependent developing countries pursue seemingly shortsighted and suboptimal policies when extracting, taxing, and investing resource rents. The book contextualizes these micro-level outcomes with an emphasis on two central political economy dimensions: the degree to which governments can make credible intertemporal commitments to both resource developers and citizens, and the degree to which governments and inclined to turn resource rents into public goods. Almost 1.5 billion people live in the more than 50 World Bank client countries classified as resource-dependent. A detailed understanding of the way political economy characteristics affect the NRM decisions made in these countries by governments, extractive developers, and society can improve the design of interventions to support welfare-enhancing policy making and governance in the natural resource sectors. Featuring case study work from Africa (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria), East Asia and Pacific (the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Mongolia, Timor-Leste), and Latin America and the Caribbean (Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Trinidad an dTobago_, the book provides guidance for government clients, domestic stakeholders, and development partners committed to transforming natural resource into sustainable development riches.

A report on development economics in action, by a crucial player in Nigeria's recent reforms. Corrupt, mismanaged, and seemingly hopeless: that's how the international community viewed Nigeria in the early 2000s. Then Nigeria implemented a sweeping set of economic and political changes and began to reform the unreformable. This book tells the story of how a dedicated and politically committed team of reformers set out to fix a series of broken institutions, and in the process repositioned Nigeria's economy in ways that helped create a more diversified springboard for steadier long-term growth. The author, Harvard- and MIT-trained economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, currently Nigeria's Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance and formerly Managing Director of the World Bank, played a crucial part in her country's economic reforms. In Nigeria's Debt Management Office, and later as Minister of Finance, she spearheaded negotiations with the Paris Club that led to the wiping out of $30 billion of Nigeria's external debt, 60 percent of which was outright cancellation. Reforming the Unreformable offers an insider's view of those debt negotiations; it also details the fight against corruption and the struggle to implement a series of macroeconomic and structural reforms. This story of development economics in action, written from the front lines of economic reform in Africa, offers a unique perspective on the complex and uncertain global economic environment.