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Purpose – In light of recent enthusiasm over African private sector development, the purpose of this paper is to review the business literature on African enterprise development with a view of identifying lacunas in the literature and of developing an analytical framework that may guide future research on this issue. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a review of the extant literature on African enterprise development by juxtaposing the traditional pessimistic view of African business performance with more recent, optimistic accounts. Based on the literature review, lacunas in the literature are identified and an integrative framework for analysing African enterprise development is developed. The framework is used to provide an overview of the received literature on African enterprise development, to identify voids and lacunas and to identify new research agendas. Findings – While a growing number of studies suggest profound improvements in the performance of African enterprises, data limitations, conceptual ambiguities and absence of comprehensive studies still cautions against sweeping generalizations. The paper reviews the literature on factors shaping the performance of African enterprises, observing that while much research is focusing on the role of the African business environments for enterprise development, much less attention has been devoted to the role of firm-specific capabilities, strategies and management. The paper concludes by advocating a contingency approach to research on African enterprise development that emphasizes the interplay between firm-specific factors and the specificities of the African business environment. Originality/value – The paper provides a comprehensive literature review on African enterprise development and presents a novel framework for understanding African enterprise development from a business perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper examines the convergence and divergence of results from economic studies of the relationships between land tenure security and agricultural productivity in Africa and how these results have been incorporated into recent agricultural, poverty alleviation, and land policy documents. The paper finds that there are both areas of convergence and divergence in the economics literature. Similarly, the attention given to land tenure and its perceived effects on productivity varies considerably in the policy literature. The significant heterogeneity in findings itself suggests that policy responses must pay attention to local context and the overarching macro and sectoral conditions within which tenure systems operate. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the distribution of economic research as catalogued in the Journal of Economic Literature across countries of the world and attempts to explain those patterns. We report the number of articles published on each country and estimate a series of regressions to understand this pattern. We find that measures of a country's size (physical and economic), connections with the outside world and data availability explain much of the pattern of research. We also find that tourism receipts, whether English is an official language, and the number of economic research institutions are significantly correlated with the amount of research done on a country. After controlling for all the variables, we find only three regions (all in Africa) with significantly less research published by economists in Journal of Economic Literature cataloged articles than North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article includes general information resources concerning the state of telecommunication in Africa. The continent is the second largest land mass in the world, with twelve percent of the world's total population, massive labor force, and possessing vast natural resources. Despite these facts, Africa has the highest world level of poverty, unemployment, regions of political and economic instability, and poor infrastructure. The economic development of the continent lies in the integration and modernization of its information and communication technology infrastructure. The scope of the article intends to survey the basics of African telecommunication in the new millennium.

This article presents a list of books and journal articles, with brief introduction, on socioeconomic issues and developments in Africa. Two books, listed here, are: "The Awakening Frontier: Trade and Investment in Sub-Saharan Africa's Burgeoning 500 Million People Marketplace," by Jude Ebere Uba and "The Impact of Europe in 1992 on West Africa," by Olusegun Obasanjo and Hans d'Orville, which includes conference papers on the economic relations between European Commission countries and West African states. Some of the articles, listed here, are: "Botswana Survey," published in the December 1990 issue of the journal "African Business" and "Buyback: The Acceptable Face of Countertrade," by Shane Bonetti, published in the January 1991 issue of the journal "African Business."