In most resource-rich countries, natural wealth does not translate into prosperity for the majority of inhabitants, but instead leads to environmental and economic devastation, and hampers democratic reform.

Only an informed public can hold leaders to account. Yet local reporting often overlooks the legal, economic, and environmental implications of resource extraction. Covering Oil: A Reporter's Guide to Energy and Development, a collaborative work of the Open Society Institute's Revenue Watch program and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, aims to encourage rigorous reporting on these issues by providing practical information about the petroleum industry and the impact of resource wealth on a producing country.

The guidebook comes out of a series of workshops for journalists in the oil-exporting countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria, during which participants expressed a need for more information to help them understand the issues surrounding resource exploitation. In response to these consultations, Covering Oil outlines the fundamentals of petroleum contracts, provides a glossary of relevant economic theory, and presents case studies of major public policy issues.

Covering Oil is the second in a series of Revenue Watch guidebooks targeting various audiences involved in the promotion of transparency and democratic accountability. The first, Follow the Money: A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues, was aimed at nongovernmental organizations.

In the fall of 2003, Stanford professor Larry Diamond received a call from Condoleezza Rice, asking if he would spend several months in Baghdad as an adviser to the American occupation authorities. Diamond had not been a supporter of the war in Iraq, but he felt that the task of building a viable democracy was a worthy goal. But when he went to Iraq, his experiences proved to be more of an education than he bargained for.

Squandered Victory is Diamond's provocative and vivid account of how the American effort to establish democracy in Iraq was hampered not only by insurgents and terrorists but also by a long chain of miscalculations, missed opportunities, and acts of ideological blindness that helped assure that the transition to independence would be neither peaceful nor entirely democratic. And in a new Afterword for the paperback edition, Diamond shows how the ongoing instability in Iraq is a direct result of the shortsighted choices made during the fourteen months of the American occupation and the subsequent Iraqi interim government.

Analyzing a variety of cross-national and sub-national data, we argue that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility, and lower investment in physical and human capital. Furthermore, the feedback effect from economic prosperity to better health care implies that mortality could be the source of a poverty trap. In our regressions, adult mortality explains almost all of Africa's growth tragedy. Our analysis also underscores grim forecasts of the long-run economic costs of the ongoing AIDS epidemic.

Many scholars claim that democracy tends to improve the material well-being of the poor. I argue that previous tests of this claim were flawed, particularly by sample bias. Once these flaws are addressed, there is no evidence that poor people have benefitted from living under democratic governments. This disturbing result suggests that democracies have not functioned well for their poorest citizens. I speculate about the reasons for this finding, and suggest avenues for further research.

Sub-Saharan Africa has a high incidence of polygyny. Countries in this region are also characterized by large age gaps between husbands and wives, high fertility, and the payment of a brideprice at marriage. In monogamous countries, on the other hand, the bride's parents traditionally give a dowry (negative brideprice) at marriage. Sub-Saharan Africa is also the poorest region of the world. In this paper I ask whether banning polygyny could play any role for development in Sub-saharan Africa.

Since this experiment does not exist in the data, I address the question using a formal model of polygyny and analyze the effects of enforcing monogamy within the model. I find that enforcing monogamy lowers fertility, shrinks the spousal age gap, and reverses the direction of marriage payments. The capital- output ratio and GDP per capita increase. The reason is that when polygyny is allowed, high brideprices are needed to ration women. This makes buying wives and selling daughters a good investment strategy that crowds out investment in physical assets. I show that these effects can be large quantitatively. For reasonable parameter values, I find that banning polygyny decreases fertility by 40%, increases the savings rate by 35% and increases output per capita by 140%.

The authors examine the global expansion of higher educational enrollments over the 20th century. Rates of growth accelerated in virtually all countries after 1960. Drawing upon institutional arguments, we discuss the nature of this transformation and the historical trends that brought it about. A changed model of society came into place globally - one in which schooled knowledge and personnel came to be seen as appropriate for a wide variety of social positions, and where many more young people could be viewed as appropriate candidates for higher education. An older vision of education as contributing to a closed society and occupational system - with associated fears of "overeducation" - was replaced by an open-system picture of education as useful "human capital" for unlimited progress. This shift involves several global changes, including:

1. increasing global emphasis on democracy and human rights;
   
2. the advent of modern national development planning; and
   
3. the expansion of science as a broad authority in social life. The authors these arguments and several others using pooled panel regression analyses over the period 1900-2000.
   

They find support for the institutional argument, as well as for several more specific arguments regarding national variation: enrollments are higher in countries better organizationally linked-in to world society, where secondary enrollments are high, where economic development is higher, and where state control over education is low. But global trends dominate the analysis, such that many developing countries now have higher enrollment rates than European countries did only a few decades ago. The article discusses implications of a world in which all countries have large elite sectors schooled in institutions that have a great deal of cultural commonality.