University of Gothenburg
University of Gothenburg
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Arne Bigsten

Professor Emeritus

Department of
Economics
Telephone
+46 31-786 13 58
+46 702-13 40 28
Mail
arne.bigsten@economics.gu.se
Visiting address
Vasagatan 1
41124 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 640
40530 Göteborg

About Arne Bigsten

Arne Bigsten is Senior Professor of Development Economics at the University of Gothenburg. He has been visiting at Oxford University, Nairobi University, Keio University, University of New South Wales, and Université d’Auvergnes. He has done projects for the World Bank, IMF, UN, ILO, Sida, IFPRI, OECD, WIDER, African Development Bank, UNIDO, and the European Commission. He has been Chairman of the African Economic Research Consortium, Vice-Chair of the European Union Development Network, and Vice-Chair of the Economic Council of Sweden. He has supervised about 50 completed PhD theses, published a dozen books and 65 refereed journal articles.

Bigsten has coordinated a large number of research projects on development issues, mostly on African economic development. The projects have concerned poverty, income distribution, trade, industrial development, foreign aid, and institutional reform. He has been extensively involved in work on the impact of international economic relations on development, starting with the large comparative study on the impact of the coffee boom in the 1970s in Kenya and Tanzania. He was engaged in the Regional Program of Enterprise Development in the 1990s, which collected panel data for manufacturing firms in African countries and produced path-breaking work on African manufacturing. He coordinated a large survey of Ethiopian households, which generated a unique panel data set covering more than a decade. He has also worked in projects on taxes, institutions and development. He is currently working on the impacts of globalization and new forms of aid.

On other web sites

Research areas

  • Development Economics
  • International economics

Teaching areas

  • Development economics
  • International economics

Selected publications

Tax Innovations and Public Revenues in Africa
Ahlerup, Pelle, Baskaran, Thushyanthan, Bigsten, Arne
Journal of Development Studies, 51:6, s. 689-706, 2015

Factor Proportions, Openness and Factor Prices in Kenya 1965-2000
Bigsten, Arne, Durevall, Dick
Journal of Development Studies, 44:2, s. 289-310, 2008

International Coordination and the Effectiveness of Aid
Bigsten, Arne, Tengstam, Sven
World Development, 69, s. 75-85, 2015