Neil McCulloch

• PhD
• The Policy Practice

Between 2005 and 2018, 41 countries had at least one riot directly associated with popular demand for fuel. We make use of a new international dataset on fuel riots to explore the effects of fuel prices and price regimes on fuel riots. In line with prior expectations, we find that large domestic fuel price shocks - often linked to international pri...

Dysfunctional and corruption-prone power sectors are a persisting challenge in many developing countries. Drawing from the theoretical framework about corruption from Khan, Andreoni and Roy [1] and applying it to electricity, this paper explores the service provision model of Electricite du Zahle (EDZ), a decentralized local utility in Lebanon. Our...

While the past decade of transitions scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the centrality of politics, key questions on transition politics deserve further research. Here, we develop a heuristic framework from the discipline of political science that separates transition politics into the classic categories of interests, ideas, institutions, as...

Fuel subsidies in Nigeria are enormous – around USD 3.9 billion – almost double the health budget. Such subsidies come at great cost: the opportunity costs of such spending on other development objectives are large; the distribution of resources to the state governments is reduced; the vast majority of the subsidy goes to better off Nigerians; and...

Energy protests are becoming increasingly common and significant around the world. While in the global North concerns tend to centre around climate issues, in the global South the concerns are more often with affordable energy. Both types of protests, however, have one issue in common: the undemocratic nature of energy policymaking. This paper draw...

Fuel riots are common around the world. Between 2005 and 2018, 41 countries had at least one riot directly associated with popular demand for fuel. We make use of a new international dataset on fuel riots to explore the effects of fuel prices and price regimes on fuel riots. In line with prior expectations, we find that large domestic fuel price sh...

An important part of every country’s development process is the building of a social contract in which citizens pay tax and, in turn, receive public goods and services. Evidence suggests that this is associated with the establishment of a norm of tax payment and a belief that non-payment is wrong. We exploit a new, nationally representative, datase...

This study explores how small business owners in Africa talk about their tax responsibility, using Nigeria as a case study. Data were collated through interviews, focus group sessions, and online chats. The study identifies two main types of tax responsibility talks amongst these business owners: (1) duty-based and (2) right-based discourses. The d...

Over the last 15 years, a set of ideas now referred to as “thinking and working politically” (TWP) have coalesced into a “second orthodoxy” about how to take context into account when implementing development interventions. This approach stresses the importance of obtaining a better understanding of the local context (“thinking politically”) in ord...

Despite the wealth that comes from being biggest oil producer in Africa, Nigeria has some of the worst development indicators in the world. From 2011 to mid‐2016, the DFID‐funded Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform (FOSTER) programme's unique design aimed to reduce incentives for the capture of oil revenue by elites and international oi...

This book is about the challenges and opportunities facing developing countries in using their extractive industries (oil and gas and mining) to achieve inclusive and sustainable development. While resource wealth can yield prosperity, it can also cause acute social inequality, deep poverty, environmental damage, and political instability. There is...

Recent literature on the effectiveness of donor programmes points to the importance of understanding the political context within which reforms are taking place. The characteristics of the power sector make reform intensely political in almost all countries and donor projects have sometimes failed because of an inability to navigate the local polit...

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the constraints facing the development of rural non-farm enterprises in Indonesia. Recent years have seen a substantial effort by the Indonesian government to improve the investment climate. To date, much of this effort has focused on the constraints faced by businesses at the national level. However,...

The original perceptron of the 1960s has been given new life in the 1980s by two innovations, a non-linear component and a new learning rule. This means that multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) can be built which are capable of learning quite complicated non-linear mappings, and hence performing very difficult pattern classification tasks. This paper de...