bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Economics of Infrastructure in Cameroon: State, Challenges, and Policy Reforms
Authors: Bougna Théophile , Noumba Um Paul 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
In this chapter, we provide a critical assessment of infrastructure development and its role in enabling business and growth in Cameroon. We begin with a brief summary of the literature on the wider economic benefits of infrastructure investments. We also explore the current state of Cameroon infrastructure and the main challenges it faces. We then rely on a simple econometric framework to link Cameroon GDP growth with the stock of different infrastructure assets and the existing complementarities. The chapter main results are the following: First, there is an infrastructureled growth potential gap in Cameroon because its infrastructure stock is not at the level of the average African country. Second, the marginal productivity of highways infrastructure is higher compare to other transport infrastructures in Cameroon. However, there are potential efficiency gains and economic benefits of investing conjointly in different infrastructure sub-sectors, especially in highways, electricity, railways and ports. Third, there are institutional failures and deficiencies in Cameroon infrastructure which are at the heart of failure to implement satisfactorily a wide range of structural infrastructure projects. Addressing these governance gaps is a necessary condition to bring much hope for future infrastructure development and economic growth in Cameroon. Taping into the domestic and regional savings, improving the business environment, implementing effectively public-privatepartnerships, and attracting private equity investors to support infrastructure development are necessary conditions to put infrastructure at the heart of Cameroon’s economic success.
Agriculture Transformation
Authors: Fregene Martin , Kahasha Gracia 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Cameroun is an agrarian country with the agricultural sector accounting for 22.5% of GDP. The agriculture sector is also the leading provider of jobs, representing nearly 43% of employed adults in 2020. With five agro-ecological zones, Cameroon’s crop, silviculture, livestock and fisheries sub-sectors could be a source of economic transformation, and a springboard for inclusive and sustainable growth. However, Cameroon’s agri-food industry is under-performing and average productivity levels of crop, livestock and aquaculture are still well below global averages. This chapter examines the main challenges of Cameroon’s agriculture sector. It presents the Government’s strategy to transform agriculture, and discusses lessons from successful approaches which are relevant to Cameroon’s ambition to transform its agriculture.
Female Entrepreneurship in Africa
Authors: Aly Mbaye Ahmadou , Gueye Fatou , Benjamin Nancy 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This paper examines data on formal and informal firms in Cameroon and explores the links between female direction of firms and the obstacles known to keep firms from reaching their full potential. The strong presence of women in the informal sector can be explained by several factors, including the size of their business activities, their poor access to education and training, as well as to financing, and institutional and socio-cultural constraints. We present results from a survey of 435 formal and informal enterprises in Yaounde and Douala.The surveys show women to be more exposed to symptoms of informality and precariousness than men. The types of activities most associated with female entrepreneurship are very small businesses, more excluded from most public infrastructure services including water, electricity, telephone and internet infrastructure services than are male-directed firms.We use a simple logistic regression model to test the profile of female entrepreneurship. Results show a strong correlation between sector of activity and gender, significant because of the strong correlation observed between sector and productivity. Finally, results show that lack of access to electricity is a key indicator of female entrepreneurship.
Financing Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Cameroon
Authors: Tawah Regina Nsang 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the small and medium enterprises sector as well as the banking sector in Cameroon. Data from various sources show that the banking sector is highly concentrated and the majority of the interests are foreign. The banking sector serves about 15 percent of the population. The chapter further uses firm-level data from the 2016 World Bank Enterprise Survey on the characteristics of SMEs in Cameroon for some estimations to determine the effect of the characteristics of the firm on SMEs’ access to working capital in banks. The results show that the size of the firm, its legal status, and some foreign activities could improve access to bank finance for SMEs. A second regression to determine firm characteristics that affect access to investments revealed that firm size and legal status were the only statistically significant variables. Given that access to funding is significantly related to the size of the firm, medium to large firms have a clear advantage relative to smaller firms in obtaining the bank financing for both working capital and investment. SMEs in Cameroon will benefit from more opportunities to build relationships with the banks. The banks could carry out intentional outreach to SMEs for less formal activities and the government promotion apparatus could leverage their resources by adding connecting SMEs to the private sector banks since their presence is limited to a few cities.
Withholding Trust
Authors: Muñoz José-María 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
For more than two decades now, Cameroon’s most prominent private sector representatives have singled out the processing of value-added tax refunds as a serious hindrance to economic activity in the country. The dimensions of this problem and its intractability derive to a large extent from a feature of the tax system known as VAT withholding. The consensus is that VAT withholding allows the state to attain certain revenue levels by modifying the normal operation of VAT and entrusting tax collection tasks to public agencies and a select group of large companies. Withholding is thus seen as a device that, while not technically optimal, enables the tax authorities to cope with VAT-related administrative challenges that they are judged not to be ready to meet fully. This chapter supplements such an expert story by focusing on how withholding is premised on sorting businesses into taxpaying categories. In the process, commercial might and managerial standards are equated and couched in terms of civic morality. The result is a deeply discriminatory tax system that treats all but a small minority of businesses as untrustworthy.
Education
Authors: Dia Kamgnia Bernadette , Bergaly Kamdem Cyrille 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Education increases people's productivity and creativity, as well as promoting entrepreneurship and advanced technologies. Also, education plays a crucial role in ensuring economic and social progress, thus improve income distribution. Its management nourished the economic debates over the years, triggered by authors such as Schultz, Becker, Mincer, Arrow, Spence, Psacharopoulos, Stiglitz, Acemoglu. Some authors pointed out that investment in education has a positive effect on its profitability, whereas for others, the effect of investment on education is small or even negative. Some others even supported the existence of a Laffer curve on returns to education. Education systems in Sub-Saharan Africa fall under the second group, due to the predominance of the informal sector which has become the only viable option for making a modest living, even for those with secondary, vocational, and tertiary education, in many African countries, including Cameroun. Based on the 2014 Cameroon household survey, in which only 9% of the individuals worked in the formal sector under a contract, positive and significant returns to education, as high as 80% for women, were found. Proper data must be collected to confirm the current findings, hence firmly reject the hypothesis of negative returns to education in a Sub-Saharan African country, as Cameroon.
Health Outcomes and Health Care Financing in Cameroon
Authors: Ntembe Augustin 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Although a bulk of health care expenditures in Cameroon is derived from private out-pocket, the government of Cameroon is the most important provider of health services in the country. The current chapter examines the relationship between public and private health expenditures and health outcomes in Cameroon. A fully modified ordinary least squares estimator for cointegrating regression that includes deterministic variables as regressors were estimated using time series for the period 1990-2018. The study controlled for real per capita income and immunization against Diptheria, Pertussis (whooping cough), and Tetanus and found that public expenditures on health care, immunization, and real per capita income have a significant long-run relationship with infant and under-5 mortality rates in Cameroon. The results suggest that public and private spending on health care should be expanded and redirected to services that have the most impact on health outcomes.
Experience as an Excess of Givenness
Authors: Mandray Sara 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter presents the post-metaphysical phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion: a phenomenology with the purpose of classifying the appearing of phenomena in a hierarchy according to their different degrees of givenness. From poor phenomena to the phenomenon of revelation, Marion questions our lack of concepts when facing the world as it appears. The Marionian gifted (echoing the transcendental subject) finds herself first called by a given word, in other words constituted by the given. This originary condition of the gifted leads Marion to investigate the paradoxical phenomena—or saturated phenomena—characterized by an excess in givenness which saturates our intelligibility. Saturated phenomena give themselves through the four dimensions which identify the phenomenon as a given in general: quantity (event, crisis), quality (idol), relation (flesh), and modality (icon). Saturation, this exception from a metaphysical point of view, becomes the norm of the post-metaphysical phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion.
At the Crossroad of Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism
Authors: Gherardi Silvia 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter invites us to an experimental encounter at the crossroads of phenomenology and feminist new materialism in which neither the reader nor the author knows in advance what onto-epistemological knowledge will emerge from the mix of concepts, bodies, images, and affects. It invites us to focus on embodiment and to follow a line of thought that belongs neither to the initiator nor to the reader, but happens ‘between them’. It proposes to the readers to immerse themselves in several short stories, coming from different sources, and to consider them as resources to think with. The diffraction of narratives, like the movement of the waves, produces six interferences in between the concept of embodiment with ordinary affect, corpomateriality, transcorporeality, virtual embodiment, becoming-animal, and affective pedagogy. The chapter ends with a discussion of the methodology of diffractive reading.
‘How about a Hug?’
Authors: Strati Antonio 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
In this essay, the continuous references between the visual language of art photography and that of the written wor(l)d underline the relevance of ‘playing with philosophy’ on the basis of the organizational knowledge acquired through study. Through the photograph Homage to Giorgio de Chirico the chapter depicts the resonances between Italian metaphysical art, the aesthetic approach to the study of organizational experience, and phenomenological and aesthetic philosophy. At the core are the themes of the liberation from anthropomorphism, the aesthetic quality of organizational materiality, and the return to study of philosophical theories and great masters. The chapter illustrates and discusses how playing with the plurality of languages, both from a semantic and from a poetic point of view, has great relevance for aesthetic research on organizational experience, because the aesthetic quality of the discourse on organizing is enriched by the evocative process of knowledge.
What Silence Does
Authors: Introna Lucas , Kavanagh Donncha , Brigham Martin 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Organization studies has a substantial literature on why employees stay silent when confronted by dysfunctional or unethical behaviour. Within this literature, organizational silence is typically depicted as having negative effects. This chapter builds on a smaller literature that sees silence more positively and productively. Intellectually, it draws on Hannah Arendt’s ideas on thinking as an internal aporetic dialogue that finds expression in dialogue with others. Thinking, for Arendt, is not about producing knowledge or practical wisdom but about discovering the meaning of things through connecting the private (silent) space of thinking with the public space of the political world of common action. Her ideas are well-illustrated in the meeting practices of the Quakers, a non-conformist Christian denomination that originated in the mid-17th century. Quaker meetings for business enact a political space where participants share their thoughts as equals, bound together in a unity of difference, where one’s silent thoughts and the contributions of others become entangled in a manner that allows for some collective sense to emerge (or not). This chapter proceeds to consider how formal rationality can threaten to obliterate the possibility of thinking and, conversely, how thinking without reasoning is equally dysfunctional. Finally, the chapter points to how our inquiry into Arendt, silence, and Quaker meetings can help us reflect on the concrete practices that exist in other contexts that might enable the enlargement of mind and collective sense-making.
Enframing and Transformation
Authors: Olivier Abraham 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
The phenomenological method, with its various approaches to studying the seminal structures of lived experience, has been a cornerstone in the thought of various African philosophers. However, their specific contributions to phenomenology are often neglected in the larger discursive terrain of African philosophy, post-colonialism and decolonization, and the global phenomenology movement. This chapter sets out to explore Serequeberhan’s special contribution to what one can call an African hermeneutic phenomenology. This chapter’s focus is on his critical adoption of Heidegger’s works in his books The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (1994) and Existence and Heritage (2015). More specifically, the chapter explores Serequeberhan’s elaboration on the problem of what Heidegger calls ‘enframing’ (Ge-stell)—the ensnarement of phenomena through their reduction to entities for industrial use within the framework of technocratic modernism. I venture to show that Serequeberhan uses the concept enframing to characterize the organization of ‘lived existence’ in the post-colonial context. Enframing manifests in the hierarchical structures of neo-colonial global capitalism used to organize social, political, and economic life within but also beyond the post-colonial African context. Enframing warrants transformation. Thus, ultimately, this chapter explores Serequeberhan’s call for ‘a transformed abode of man in the world’.
Phenomenology in Japan
Authors: Uemura Genki 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter outlines the development of Japanese phenomenology from its beginning to early in the 21st century. Section 28.2 focuses on the initial phase of its reception in Japan in the 1910s. A remarkable feature common in discussions of this period is that Japanese philosophers interpreted Husserl with reference to Neo-Kantianism. This perspective would persist in the reception of phenomenology in Japan into the 1920s, on which Section 28.3 focuses. This period is striking because, for one thing, Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology had an impact even before the publication of his Being and Time in 1927. Even more importantly, it was in this same period that researchers from applied areas began to show an interest in phenomenology. Section 28.4 deals with how phenomenology in prewar Japan came into full maturity between the latter half of the 1920s and the middle 1930s. This section will argue that phenomenological research in applied areas also reached a high point in this phase of its maturation. Section 28.5 touches on selected episodes of phenomenology in postwar Japan, emphasizing discussions over its application.
Postscript
Authors: Ingold Tim 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
What does phenomenology entail for the practice of field research? Is the anthropological method of participant observation, in taking the world as a milieu of study, rather than its object, intrinsically phenomenological? To answer these questions, I describe how in my work as an ecological anthropologist, starting from a perspective rooted in the natural sciences, I eventually found myself, after a detour through ecological psychology, dipping into the writings of first Heidegger and then Merleau-Ponty. Revisiting my fieldnotes, they turn out to serve less as a repository of qualitative data that as an aid to memory, making it possible to relive past experience in the here and now. Rarely had I captured this experience in my notes, which are largely confined to what I had observed or what people had told me. It rather wells up through the cracks in the factual record. But it is not so much in participant observation and writing fieldnotes as in their subsequent writing up as ethnography, that anthropology finally parts company with phenomenology. Truly phenomenological writing, I conclude, differs from conventional ethnography in that it is a writing ‘with’ rather than ‘about’. This means joining our own lines with the writing of the world, so that the minds of readers can, in turn, mingle with ours.
The Self in the World
Authors: Savage Paul , Franck Henrika 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Paul Ricoeur’s work on phenomenology proposes a self in the world, in a world that is acted upon by, and acting upon, the self. This chapter outlines some of the major movements Ricoeur made during his long and prolific academic career. His method was to create dialogue between two juxtaposed positions and explore how, together, they offer more than their separate parts. The particular and the general, as well as the abstract and the concrete, became the planes upon which Ricoeur positions the self in relation to the other, through language and narrative, in time. This chapter’s aim is to articulate Ricoeur’s way of understanding experience in the light of his varied approaches to the self.
The Deep History of Musicality
Authors: Killin Anton 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Absent from the behavioral repertoire of other great apes, music is a distinctive feature of human social life in all known cultures, and a valued feature—one that plays many roles in human life, as attested by the anthropological record. Music accompanies ritual and praise, is a pedagogical tool, endows events additional layers of cultural meaning, and provides entertainment and emotional and social experiences, to name but a few. Music is ancient: The musical traditions of the world’s cultures have deep roots. Complex musical artifacts appear in the archaeological record from 40,000 years ago. The oldest known are flutes (pipes) made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, discovered in the European Upper Palaeolithic. It was once thought that the art, music, and symbolism evidenced at those European sites bespoke a cognitive revolution around that time. This view of the evolution of behavioral modernity has been deeply challenged over the last 20 years or so; gradualist theories now place the evolution of behavioral modernity and the distinctively human cognitive capacities underwriting that behavior earlier in our pre-exodus African forebears. Debate remains about the character of that evolutionary trajectory. Taking music as a case in point, this chapter provides examples of theories of music’s origins and evolution and argues for a coevolutionary perspective that sees music as known today as emerging from a mosaic of features. It examines recent work in evolutionary cognitive archaeology connecting Acheulean stone tool production with a widespread human capacity—entrainment—requisite for much music making and recounts the controversy over the alleged “Neandertal flute.”
The Cultural Ecology of Fear
Authors: Pettitt Paul 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Cognitive archaeology has curiously neglected the evolution of human funerary belief and practice, despite the abundance of evidence for this remarkably diverse aspect of human behavior in the archaeological record. Palaeoanthropologists have taken a somewhat black-and-white approach to the subject, often in terms of whether hominins did or did not practice burial and, therefore, whether they were “cognitively modern” or not. In recent years, the ethological information on animal responses to the dead has improved remarkably and offers strong contextual data from the biological world with which to begin to write an account of evolutionary thanatology. This chapter reviews the psychological and ethological data, establishing a hypothetical (and perhaps falsifiable) evolutionary scheme in which purely chemical responses to the corpse are increasingly supplemented by the emotions, a concept of death and the conception of souls, to the complex and modestly counterintuitive beliefs that can be glimpsed with the dawn of written records in the third millennium B.C. The chapter reviews the archaeological record in this light, suggesting three cognitive phases of evolution of funerary belief took primates from chemistry to culture in the form of widening landscapes of fear.
Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Historiography of the Middle
Authors: Hinton Stephen 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
The notion of a cultural landscape conceived in terms of defining polarities with a “middle” territory in between predates the concept of a “middlebrow” in Western music history by almost a century. Music’s juste milieu, made famous by Schumann, derives from French political culture of the 1830s. Postdating the English term is mittlere Musik, a German concept from the Cold War era applied to a variety of music from the long nineteenth century, thus overlapping with, on the one hand, Schumann’s polemics and, on the other, with the aesthetics of what Walter Benjamin dubbed “the age of mechanical reproduction.” Exploring these three terms in relation to one another, the author scrutinizes the broader historical and aesthetic context of the prediction, made by Constant Lambert in 1934, that “the middlebrow composer will disappear” and presents historiographical reasons why the foretold “oblivion” has proved, in recent decades, to be inaccurate.