African development: past and present

The Center of African Economies hosted a workshop on natural resource encounters and structural transformation in Africa at Roskilde University on 16 May 2017.

The workshop brought together researchers from the CAE and the Department of Economic History at Lund University to discuss emerging questions related to land, investments and economic development in Africa.  CAE researchers use political economy perspectives on relations between investors, local populations and political elites in large-scale natural resource investments together, while researchers at Lund University apply a historical approach to detect long-term changes and work on long-term agricultural development, natural resource export dependency and sustained growth/structural transformations. The aim of the workshop was to bring these two traditions together and to identify synergies between them. 

The workshop concluded with a launch of the CAE new working paper series and the presentation of the first four papers in the series, which feature new research from the AfriCap project.