Productivity gains are the prime engine of economic growth. This paper uses a rich amount of firms’ accounting information from the Single Information Collecting Centre in Senegal over the period 1998-2011. To investigate the two main obstacles to...
Three major policy regimes, namely import substitution, market liberalization and export promotion have greatly influenced Kenyan industrialization since independence in 1963. Overall, import substitution strategy was successful in establishing some...
Imed Drine Many observers see youth unemployment as the major reason behind the recent popular uprisings in a number of Arab countries. Increasing...
The Republic of South Africa faces the imperative of escaping economic stagnation. This paper seeks to synthesize results from a series of research efforts, including but not limited to the work conducted under the UNU-WIDER project on ‘Regional...
Employment in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia has grown more slowly than GDP over the last several decades. This means GDP per capita is rising. Vietnamese policymakers, however, are concerned that ongoing structural transformation is creating too few...
Improvements in productivity are necessary to effectively increase economic growth in the long term. The literature emphasizes a positive correlation between firm-level innovation and productivity gains. It is unsurprising, then, that policy makers...
In the preceding pages we have attempted a detailed rebuttal of the view that, given the prevailing structural constraints imposed by the unequal distribution of land and other assets, growth through Green Revolution must impoverish, or at best by...
The transfer from an import-substitution to an export-orientation strategy has been in effect in Vietnam since the reform process, Doi Moi, necessitating the reformulation of macroeconomic, trading and sectoral policies. As a result, the industry...
In this paper we explore the extent to which firms experience productivity spillovers from clustering using a rich data source from Vietnam for 2002 to 2007, a period of significant transition. We address issues of simultaneity, self-selection and...
In this paper, we investigate the relationship between exporting and productivity in the case of Vietnam using an extensive firm level panel dataset for the period 2005-11. We separate out productivity effects of exporting due to self-selection...
Using a rich panel dataset of small and medium scale manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) active in the manufacturing sector in Viet Nam, this paper investigates the drivers of firm productivity, focusing on the role played by international management...
This paper explores the impacts of information technology investment on economic growth in a cross-section of 39 countries in the period 1980-95 by applying an explicit model of economic growth, the augmented version of the neoclassical (Solow)...
Despite the fast catching up in the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) experienced by most EU countries in the last few years, information technologies have so far delivered few productivity gains in Europe. In the second...
We compare economic efficiencies in Brazil, India, and China, where economic efficiency measures the gap between potential and actual output for a given input combination and technological factor. We use stochastic production frontier models to...
This paper analyses the patterns of export productivity and trade specialization profiles in the China, Brazil, India and South Africa, and in other regional groupings. In doing so, the investigation calculates a time varying export productivity...
Using a panel of 139 countries over the period 1992-2003, we analyse the links between export productivity, economic growth and financial development indicators. We then investigate whether the links observed in China, India and Brazil systematically...
Following the economic liberalization in India, the service sector has gained prominence in the economy as it accounts for the largest share of GDP and, also that the share of this sector in GDP has been growing very rapidly. Empirical data reveal...
Can we use neoclassical growth model to single out the important transmission channels through which external factors or ‘primitives’ affected the Indian economy and caused the remarkable growth of the period 1982–2002? In this paper, we answer the...
This paper discusses the livelihood dynamics in the fragile landscape of the semi arid tropics (SAT) of Andhra Pradesh. SAT is home to the poorest of the poor who live in conditions of persistent drought, subsistence agriculture and poor access to...
As the experience of the 20th century has shown, implementing policies that increase agricultural productivity among smallholders is a particularly promising strategy to achieve pro-poor growth. However, history also reveals major political...
This paper proposes an alternative approach to investigate the non-linear effect of external debt on growth. In the theoretical part, we develop an endogenous growth model with formal and informal sectors to analyse the effect of the public external...
An often-neglected potential negative consequence of tariffs is the impact they may have on the misallocation of factor inputs. Trade protection can provide space for domestic firms to increase prices and mark-ups, allowing low-productivity firms to...
The situation of Afghanistan has drawn a picture of a poor, conflict-prone, doomed country. But this does not have to be the case. We have examples of...
This paper explores the contribution of structural change and the skill upgrading of the labour force to productivity. Our growth decomposition based on an original database we built for Tunisia and Turkey shows that productivity is mainly explained...
The lingering policy dilemma facing many governments in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years is what can be done in the short to medium term to boost the output and incomes of individuals and enterprises in the informal sector, given the size and...
Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, including Morocco, currently record the lowest rates of female labour force participation (FLFP) in the world. These rates — between 20-30% in 2019 — appear substantially low in comparison to Western...
We update Kreuser and Newman’s (2018) total factor productivity estimates for the South African manufacturing sector using administrative data from 2009–17. We use standard implementations of the Ackerberg et al. (2015) and Wooldridge (2009)...
This paper explores agricultural performance of Mozambique, its institutional weaknesses, and the underlying factors that underpin an unsatisfactory performance during many decades. We point to the role of systemic political instability and violence...
The financial intermediation-growth nexus is a widely studied topic in the literature of development economics. Deepening financial intermediation may promote economic growth by mobilizing more investments, and lifting returns to financial resources...
The quality of people’s jobs is a fundamental determinant of their well-being, and judging the state of a labour market on the basis of job quantity alone delivers a very partial picture. This study is an attempt to place the spotlight on the working...
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