The current commodity price boom in combination with high price volatility is historically unprecedented even in the volatile price history of commodities. After two decades of low commodity prices in the 1980s and 1990s, many commodities had registered steep price increases since 2002 reaching a peak in mid 2008. In the second half of 2008 prices fell sharply across commodities but they began to [...]

Over the past three decades the global economy has witnessed the rise of organizationally fragmented and geographically dispersed global production networks (GPNs). An increasing amount of literature drawing on chain and network conceptualizations has accumulated on how these changes affect countries, regions and firms. Comparatively little has, however, been said about the effects on workers and [...]

Value chain interventions are increasingly used by international organizations and national donor agencies in the context of their private sector development (PSD) activities. These interventions are broadly labeled as "value chains for development" and share common characteristics such as the focus on improving market access conditions for and upgrading opportunities of developing country firms [...]

Since the early 1990ies, Private Sector Development has become a major issue within the field of development policies. Consequently, bi- and multilateral development banks, i.e. institutions that basically provide finance for projects in developing and emerging countries have been gaining in importance. The visions of these development finance institutions reflect their conviction that the private [...]

This paper discusses integral implementation problems of the aid harmonization process within the European Union (EU) which has pretty much failed to show up with convincing results yet. Therefore this paper looks on the origins of the problems EU donors struggle with. It has turned out that in the past, comparative advantage assessment has been avoided by most donors. Hence, it is argued here [...]

Budgethilfe ist ein relativ neues Instrument der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit, das in den letzten Jahren vermehrt in verschiedenen Staaten Afrikas südlich der Sahara eingesetzt wird, um dem Anspruch von mehr Wirksamkeit in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit gerecht zu werden und den Regierungen in den Empfängerstaaten mehr Eigenverantwortung zu übertragen. Auch in Äthiopien ist die Bedeutung dieser [...]