africa

Africa at a Fork in the Road: Taking Off or Disappointment Once Again?
at the US Agency for International Development. He has made contributions in the
areas of economic and agricultural development, the measurement and analysis
of poverty and malnutrition, the social accounting matrix and general equilibrium
modeling, and international economic policy. The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty
measure has been adopted as the standard poverty measure by the World Bank
and practically all UN agencies and is used almost universally by researchers doing
empirical work on poverty. In recent years he co-directed a large-scale research
project on The Impact of Globalization on the World’s Poor under the auspices of the
United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research,
and undertook research on inclusive growth in Africa and Asia. During 2013 he was
closely involved in research activities of the African Economic Research Consortium
(AERC); he chairs the thematic research group of the AERC on Poverty, Income
Distribution, and Food Security.
Christopher Udry
Henry J. Heinz, II Professor of Economics; Chair, Council on African Studies, Yale
University
Christopher Udry is a development economist whose research focuses on rural
economic activity in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has conducted extensive field research
in West Africa on technological change in agriculture; the use of financial markets,
asset accumulation, and gift exchange to cope with risk; gender relations; and the
structure of household economies, property rights, and a variety of other aspects
of rural economic organization. He spent two years as a secondary school teacher
in northern Ghana, and has been a visiting scholar at Ahmadu Bello University in
Nigeria and at the University of Ghana at Legon. At Yale, Professor Udry has directed
the Economic Growth Center and served as Chair of the Department of Economics.
He teaches graduate courses on development economics, and undergraduate
courses on economic development in Africa. He received his BA from Swarthmore
College and his PhD in Economics from Yale University.
Leonard Wantchekon
Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Leonard Wantchekon uses his background in economics to analytically address
social science questions related to his numerous academic interests in political and
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