Githinji, Mwangi

Job Title

Associate Professor & Graduate Program Director, Department of Economics

Last Name

Githinji

First Name

Mwangi

Discipline

Economics

Expertise

Marxian Class analysis
The impact of East Asian development on African countries
The political economy of development with particular interest in Africa and issues of inequality, poverty, rural development and the environment

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Industrialization, Exports and the Developmental State in Africa: The Case for Transformation
(2011-08) wa Githinji, Mwangi; Adesida, Olugbenga
This essay explores the role of the state in promoting exports and industrialization in the quest for transformation of African economies. It does this by exploring the role of trade in African economies followed by a brief look at the East Asian Developmental state. This is followed by an examination of why many African states have failed at being drivers of transformation. It concludes by examining the potential role of African states in a project of transformation as well as the available avenues and resources for transformation.
Erasing Class/ (re)Creating Ethnicity: Jobs, Politics, Accumulation and Identity in Kenya
(2012-09) wa Githinji, Mwangi
A large literature on African economies argues that ethnicity plays a role in the politics and economics of African countries. Unfortunately, much of this literature is speculative or anecdotal because of the lack of data, with the exception of a few papers that examine ethnic networking as a business or employment strategy. In many ways Africa’s failure to develop is a failure of nationhood. Creating nation is handicapped by the use of ethnicity. In this paper, I empirically examine the relationship between employment, wages and ethnicity in Africa via a case study of Kenya. I challenge the pervasive view that ethnicity in Africa is related to a primordial instinct and attempt to show empirically that ethnicity is used by politicians as a political strategy to maintain power. In the process of using ethnicity, class solidarity is explicitly down played by politicians as ethnicity is reified. In this paper I specifically examine whether jobs are being used by politicians as both reward and carrot to ensure ethnic allegiances. This is done by testing whether being a member of a dominant group (in terms of population and also politically) has an impact on the possibility of employment and the level of wages. I do this using data from the 1986 Labour Force Survey which due to timing, uniquely allows me to connect ethnicity and income. I group the observation into 5 groups that are ranked based on kind of employment and wage. Of the five sectors the two desirable sectors are Self-employed above median income and Full time employment above median income. I test whether ethnicity has an impact of one being employed in these sectors. By inter‐acting the dummy variable for dominant group in population and the ethnic dummy, I am able to separate out what may be returns just due to ethnic networking that comes from common culture, language etc and returns which are due in some sense to being from a politically dominant ethnicity. I am also able to test for the impact in a change in the ethnicity of the president (a further test of ethnic dominance) by using a difference in difference approach. I find that being in a politically dominant group improves one’s chances of obtaining a full time above median wage job. In fact this improvement in chances was highly correlated with political power and a change of ethnicity of the president resulted in a decrease in the probabilities of the past presidents “kinsfolk” being in desired sectors. Being a member of a locally dominant group in terms of population as compared to a politically dominant national group has no effect on likelihood of employment in one of the premium categories. My findings support the view that in a highly centralized state ethnicity can be reproduced via preferential employment to members of an in-group thus diminishing class solidarity that one may expect to occur between workmates.
Land, Poverty and Human Development in Kenya
(2011-11) wa Githinji, Mwangi
The question of poverty has become central to the work of development economists in the last decade and a half. The 2000 World Development Report was entitled Attacking Poverty and the UN held a series of World Conferences in the 1990s, all of which addressed in some form or fashion the problem of poverty. Despite this and because of limited data there has been relatively little empirical work at the household level on determinants of poverty in Africa generally and Kenya specifically. In the few econometric studies that have been done for Kenya land has not been a significant determinant of poverty. This is a surprising result for a country where 80 per cent of the population depends on agriculture. Further the little that has been done has not incorporated the role of human development in the determination of poverty. Via an examination of a nationwide sample this paper will examine the role that land and social capital play in determining households poverty status in rural Kenya in addition to the standard theorized determinants.
Transparency without Accountability
(2011-10) wa Githinji, Mwangi; Holmquist, Frank
Kenya has been going through a period of political reform from 1991 when section 2A of the constitution that had made Kenya a de jure one party state was repealed. The reform followed a prolonged struggle by citizens both within and without the country. Their call for democracy was one that, post the fall of the Berlin wall, was embraced by western countries. Via diplomatic pressure and conditionality on aid, western donors played an important role in the repeal of section 2a, the return of multi-party elections and in the creation and reform of a number of political institutions and offices. In the main these changes were pushed by the donors and though supported by the opposition in Kenya they did not rise organically from the struggle over political power in Kenya. In this paper, we argue that although these reforms led to a heightened awareness of the ills of the political class, they failed to actually hold members of this class accountable for their transgressions. We argue that these institutions presupposed the existence of an electorate with an effective set of identities that belonged to the larger Kenyan nation. This broader construct of society did not exist. A history of economic and political inequality from the inception of modern Kenya had resulted in a divided population that was unable to exercise this mandate, and could ultimately discipline politicians when they failed. In actuality, since the politics was not based on broader Kenyan national interests but rather narrower personal interests construed as ethno-nationalist, the political class was not accountable to the larger Kenyan constituency.
Small and as Productive : Female Headed Households and the Inverse Relationship between Land Size and Output in Kenya
(2011-11) wa Githinji, Mwangi; Konstantinidis, Charalampos; Barenberg, Andrew
Access to land and particularly its distribution has reemerged as an important part of both academic and policy discussions in the last decade, leading to the resuscitation of the debate on the relationship between size of holdings and output per land unit. Across the world, studies have suggested the existence of a decreasing relationship between land size and output per unit of land. The most-widely accepted explanation for this relationship is that households with smaller holdings tend to be labor rich relative to land, and therefore can achieve higher output through the increased application of labor. Despite the rich literature on this topic there has been little work on whether this relationship is valid for female-headed households, particularly in the case of African countries. Past African studies have found female-headed households to be smaller by close to one adult in comparison to male-headed households. Given this difference one would expect there to be a difference in the outcome of land redistribution for different types of households, ceteris paribus. Additionally, the aggregate impact in African countries could be substantial, as female-headed households comprise in several cases up to 30 percent of the rural households. In this paper we will examine empirically whether the inverse size and output relationship is different between female and male headed households in the case of Kenya, using the Kenya Integrated Household Budget and Expenditure Survey of 2006, which includes modules on agricultural holdings and agricultural output in addition to the standard demographic characteristics. By controlling for the endogeneity of crop choice and fertilizer use we are able to find that cash crop production and human capital, and not differences in household size, determines the differences in male and female headed land productivity. Hence, our study goes beyond the simple discussion of the inverse relationship between land size and output per unit and the potential impact of redistribution. Specifically we will be able to address the kind of broad rural development policies in addition to land redistribution that would allow female headed households to do at least as well as (if not better than) male headed households.
Migration in Kenya: Beyond Harris-Todaro
(2017) Oyvat, Cem; wa Githinji, Mwangi
This paper examines the impact of agrarian structures on the migration behavior and destination of rural household heads and individuals in Kenya. To explore the complexity of migration we extend the standard Harris-Todaro framework to account for land inequality and size. In addition, we disaggregate urban destination into different types of urban centers and also consider rural-to-rural migration. Using logistic regressions, we show that Kenyan household heads born in districts with higher land inequality, smaller per capita land and lower per capita rural income are more likely to migrate. Hence, poverty and inequality in Kenyan rural districts are transmitted to other areas over time. Our estimates also show that, for peasants whose incomes are squeezed by larger land inequality, migration from villages to suburban Nairobi, smaller cities, and villages in different districts could be a preferable strategy to migrating to Metro Nairobi. The impact of land inequality is more significant for male migration than female migration. Moreover, the level of education, age, marital status, gender, religion and distance to Nairobi play a role in the migration behavior of rural dwellers.