The sixteen essays edited and synthesized by Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson contribute significantly to our understanding of the following questions: (1) When did Africa become poor?; (2) Why did Africa become poor?; and (3) Why has Africa remained poor? Although these questions are impossible to answer in a definitive way, the partial explanations offered in this book are insightful and thought provoking and are summarized in this article. However, they also rest primarily on economic and political arguments. The importance of geography, which is mostly not explored in these essays, is reviewed in the final section of this article.

Why do governments tax exports at rates that are ultimately self-defeating? An answer may lie in the time-inconsistent nature of a low-tax policy. Using a dynamic model of export taxation, I show that the sustainability of a low-tax policy depends on three variables: the ratio of sunk costs to total costs, how heavily future export revenue is discounted, and expected future export earnings. Using data on taxation, leadership duration, and profitability, I test this theory for 32 countries and six crops from Sub-Saharan Africa. These three variables are statistically and economically relevant predictors of tax regime.

Using firm-level data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, we estimate the impact on U.S. manufacturing employment of changes in foreign affiliate wages. We show that the motive for offshoring and, consequently, the location of offshore activity, significantly affects the impact of offshoring on parent employment. In general, offshoring to low-wage countries substitutes for domestic employment. However, for firms that do significantly different tasks at home and abroad, foreign and domestic employment are complements. These offsetting effects may be combined to show that offshoring by U.S.-based multinationals is associated with a quantitatively small decline in manufacturing employment.

We link industry-level data on trade and offshoring with individual-level worker data from the Current Population Surveys from 1984 to 2002. We find that occupational exposure to globalization is associated with significant wage effects, while industry exposure has no significant impact. We present evidence that globalization has put downward pressure on worker wages through the reallocation of workers away from higher-wage manufacturing jobs into other sectors and other occupations. Using a panel of workers, we find that occupation switching due to trade led to real wage losses of 12 to 17 percentage points.