Guest contributor

‘Flourishing Cities’ is the theme this week of our annual Challenges of Government conference at the Blavatnik School of Government here in Oxford. From an Africa perspective, the conference programme speaks to the scale of urban development and human security challenges in fast-growing cities. Far from Oxford’s pleasant setting, these challenges come across very vividly in the heaving expanse of cities from the Cape Flats in South Africa to Cairo.

International investors are watching closely as Brazilians prepare to vote in the second round of the presidential election on October 26. Their vote will not only decide who will be the country’s next president; it may also determine the future of the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), and therefore the […]

The recent economic crisis has revealed, amongst other things, that certain political systems in southern Europe seriously struggle to deliver good governance. Political elites in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain have not only proven incapable of delivering prosperity to their people but have presided over (and in some cases profited […]