News Feature

The ‘natural experiments’ approach to economics that won three researchers the 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences has helped to make the field more robust, say economists. Joshua Angrist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Guido Imbens at Stanford University in California and David Card at...

Kenya is paying a heavy price for its weak, ambiguous and even non-existent foreign policy, that has seen chunks of its territory “annexed” or claimed by all its neighbours, experts say. Tuesday ruling by the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ) that could alter the maritime border between Kenya...

Ethiopia’s national army’s offensive launched on Monday has focused on rebel positions in Amhara, where government officials say half a million people have been uprooted in recent months. Aid agencies were already struggling to reach parts of the region, particularly those under rebel occupation. Although rebels said their forces are...

Ethiopia’s government has launched a new offensive against rebel forces from the blockaded Tigray region, where malnutrition and starvation deaths are rising while UN officials coordinating the humanitarian response have been deported from the country. Major air and ground operations against rebel positions in the neighbouring Amhara region reportedly commenced...

Hunger is rising in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and the clearest sign may be who’s now struggling to afford food: the educated, urban, and middle-class. Weeks after the Taliban’s mid-August takeover, Afghanistan’s aid-dependent economy is straining under donor funding freezes and currency shortages. Food and commodity prices are soaring, work and income...

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) team has done its study on population growth quite differently. Instead of basing its model on fertility rates, and how they would change, the group used a variable called completed cohort fertility at 50 years (CC50). This counts the number of children...

Predictions of population in both the near and long-term future typically come down to estimates of how quickly fertility will change. And that means demographers have to make some educated guesses about how people will behave as their circumstances alter. In high-income countries, these behavioural changes are usually driven by...

A little over a year ago, the Moria refugee camp on Lesvos burnt to the ground – thrusting the dismal conditions in the overcrowded, under-resourced and squalid camps on the Greek islands into the international spotlight. The Greek government has since declared success in bringing the movement of asylum seekers...

Like the rest of the world, the continent has seen public discontent growing even as wealth has improved. Public discontent, defined as the collective feeling of frustration and unmet expectations, has risen globally, despite improvements in overall wealth. The same is true for Africa. Between 1990 and 2019, gross domestic...