The Fragile Definition of State Fragility

We investigates the link between fragility and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa over a
yearly panel including 28 countries for the 1999-2004 period. Beside the conventional definition of
fragility adopted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, we introduce the more severe
definition of extreme fragility. We show that only the latter exerts a significantly negative impact on
economic development, once standard economic, demographic, and institutional regressors are
accounted for. As a by-product of this investigation we produce up-to-date evidence on the growth
performance of the area. We find a tendency to convergence and no influence of geographic and
historical factors.