Karol Boudreaux on Property Rights and Incentives in Africa

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2007

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

Karol Boudreaux, Senior Research Fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her field work and research in Rwanda and South Africa. In Rwanda, she studied how a change in incentives and property rights for coffee farmers has allowed the coffee bean growers to improve quality and prosper. In South Africa's Langa Township, she looked at how renters were allowed to become homeowners and how the ability to own changed their lives.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. My guest today is my colleague, Carol Boudreau, senior fellow at the
0:41.0	Mercatus Center here at George Mason University, lead researcher for Enterprise Africa, and a
0:47.2	member of the Working Group on Property Rights at the UN's Commission on Legal Empowerment
0:51.1	of the Poor. Carol, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you, Russ. I'm really pleased to be here.
0:55.7	Carol, tell us what is Enterprise Africa? Enterprise Africa is a research project that's just entering
1:01.6	its third year, and the goal of our project is to investigate and analyze and really understand
1:08.8	in some detail what seems to be working on the ground in Africa to alleviate poverty and promote
1:15.8	some economic development. We've looked at a series of different kinds of cases, some looking at
1:24.0	individual entrepreneurs who've been able to succeed or not in Africa try to understand why.
1:30.5	In some cases that we're looking at government policies that in our characterization creates
1:37.7	some space for entrepreneurship, and then we're also trying to look at some examples of the private
1:43.2	provision of social services. So three different categories of cases, and the idea is get a really
1:49.6	good sense of what's going on on the ground in Africa. And I want to let the listeners know we're
1:53.6	going to look at two or three of Carol's studies and some of the results that you found. How many
2:00.1	countries have you been to in Africa as part of this project? I've been to seven different countries,
2:05.3	mostly in Southern and East Africa, haven't been to West Africa yet, and if you count Mauritius,
2:11.2	which is- I count it. Okay, so Mauritius as well. And who goes on these case studies,
2:17.5	research trips? Who are you going with? That's a good question. Occasionally I'm going with PhD
	...

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