Working Paper
New technologies create opportunities
This paper argues that new technologies—for communication, such as mobile phones and the internet, but also for manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and transport—have the potential to bridge many of the productivity gaps between sub-Saharan Africa...
Journal Article
Exploring regional and gender disparities in Beninese primary school attendance
DHS data is combined with school supply statistics to study primary school attendance in the 2005–06 school year in Benin, a country that has seen almost unparalleled increases in attendance since the 1990s. Results of a logistic regression model...
Working Paper
Public savings in Africa
Do sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) contribute to Africa’s development? This paper assesses the objectives of SWFs (fiscal stabilization, productive investment, intergenerational saving) and discusses alternatives. We argue that fiscal stabilization...
Working Paper
India’s development cooperation in Africa
This paper examines multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa and argues that grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges can help...
Working Paper
Foreign aid and intergenerational mobility in Africa
While there is extensive literature examining the growth and development effects of foreign aid, very little attention has been paid to its potential impact on social mobility. Thus, this paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of...
Working Paper
Agricultural risks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and farm household welfare and diversification strategies in Africa
Agricultural activities in many African countries are bedevilled by a range of risk factors. Using micro-level household datasets from a range of countries in Africa, we examine the drivers of agricultural risks, while exploring the role of context...
Working Paper
Unravelling Africa’s raw material footprints and their drivers
This paper applies an environmentally extended input–output analysis, leveraging the Eora database, to estimate the global raw material footprints of 51 African nations from 1995 to 2015. It employs least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and...
Background Note
COVID-19 and socioeconomic impact in Africa
The COVID-19 pandemic has now spread to over 180 countries, including several countries in sub-Saharan Africa.1 Kenya reported its first COVID-19 case on 13 March 2020. By 31 March the number of confirmed cases had risen to 59, with over 70 per cent...
Working Paper
The effect of fiscal drag on income distribution and work incentives
Although the effect of fiscal drag is well studied in the industrialized world, empirical evidence from developing economies remains limited. Against this backdrop, this study aims to explore the effect of fiscal drag on income distribution and work...
Working Paper
Ethnicity is not public service destiny
Millions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress’s promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains...
Working Paper
The role of trust and of poverty in compliance with social distancing measures in Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic
Since it began, the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a number of challenges on Africa and the rest of the world. Following the recommendations of the World Health Organization, many countries imposed social distancing measures and cancelled non...
Working Paper
Exploring economic support networks amidst racial inequality in Namibia
Community or interpersonal support as a critical source of livelihood sustenance in the Global South can exhibit unequal dynamics. An understanding of these practices is primarily tied to the conceptual space of poverty or small communities. Less is...
Working Paper
Donors for tax morale
Do aid projects affect citizens’ motivation to pay taxes? We address this question by combining fine-grained data on aid projects from AidData and survey data from the Afrobarometer for 34 African countries. We first employ a subnational analysis...
Journal Article
Normalizing necessity?
Community support is a critical source to sustain livelihoods in the Global South. At the same time, these practices can exhibit unequal dynamics such as disincentives, hierarchies, or adverse inclusion of individuals. However, an understanding of...
Journal Article
Decomposing learning inequalities in East Africa
Inequalities in learning opportunities arise from both household- and school-related factors. Although these factors are unlikely to be independent, few studies have considered the extent to which sorting between schools and households might...
Working Paper
The mitigating role of tax and benefit rescue packages for poverty and inequality in Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemic
This paper analyses the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and related tax-benefit measures in 2020 in a cross-country comparative perspective for five African countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. We first estimate...
Working Paper
Exploring regional and gender disparities in Beninese primary school attendance
This study combines household survey data from the Beninese Demographic and Health Survey with school supply statistics in order to investigate regional and gender disparities in primary school attendance rates in Benin. Despite almost unparalleled...
Working Paper
Rwanda
Since civil war and genocide left the country in ruins, Rwanda has undergone a remarkable transformation. Growth rates since 1995 have averaged 8 per cent annually, poverty rates have fallen, maternal and child health have improved, and...
Working Paper
Tax revenue data in Africa: the Government Revenue Dataset and African Tax Outlook in comparison
This paper compares two important sources of tax revenue statistics for African countries, namely the Africa Tax Administration Forum’s African Tax Outlook and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research's...
Working Paper
Wind turbine and photovoltaic generating efficiency in Africa
As the technology of climate-dependent energy sources is improving—both cheaper and more efficient—the energy sources are becoming more accessible for many of the nations in Africa. However, little is known about the underlying climate that would...
Working Paper
Technical note
Regional power pools present a significant and potentially defining opportunity for African power systems to develop domestic energy resources, improve system reliability, and contribute to overall economic development. Hydropower is expected to play...
Working Paper
The political economy of ‘linked’ progressive taxation in Africa and Latin America
One key element in the reduction of poverty and (in Latin America) inequality has been the achievement of greater fiscal equity; we analyse one key part of this process, which is the earmarking of portions of tax revenue to be spent on progressive...
Working Paper
Does sorting matter for learning inequality?
Inequalities in children’s learning are widely recognized to arise from variations in both household- and school-related factors. While few studies have considered the role of sorting between schools and households, even fewer have quantified how...
Journal Article
Linked-in by FDI
This study combines evidence from interviews in seven countries with (i) government institutions responsible for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), (ii) 102 multinationals (MNEs), and (iii) 226 domestic firms linked to these foreign...
Working Paper
Industrial clusters
Firms tend to cluster in close geographic proximity to each other to benefit from reduced transport costs, shared inputs, and productivity spillovers due to learning and technology transfers. Evidence from low-income countries suggests that such...
Working Paper
Tourism global value chains and Africa
As Africa continues to attract record numbers of international arrivals, there are industry undercurrents that influence the continent’s participation in tourism value chains. African tourism is characterized by high foreign demand, which elevates...
Working Paper
The global politics of social protection
Since the early 2000s international development agencies have actively promoted social protection as a new global public policy. This process can be understood as flowing from related shifts within the global political economy and of development...
Working Paper
Excess female mortality in Africa
Relative to developed countries, there are far fewer women than men in parts of the developing world. Estimates suggest that more than 200 million women are demographically ‘missing’ worldwide. To explain the global ‘missing women’ phenomenon...
Research Brief
Technology, tourism, malls, and metros
There is growing recognition around the world that tradable services can play a valuable role in economic development. Africa is no exception, with the need for multiple routes to growth, particularly vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic. Tradable...
Working Paper
Crowding out effects of financial knowledge and attitude on risk preferences
Using hand-collected survey and experimental data, we examine the determinants of financial literacy as well as the link between self-reported risk and elicited risk preferences in a least developed African country, Guinea. We measure financial...
Working Paper
Resource rents in the diamond industry 2014–19
The focus of this study is rent in the diamond industry. Based on extensive datasets and a discussion of all relevant costs, we present resource rent statistics from the diamond industry in key producer countries in emerging economies such as Angola...
Working Paper
Building malls or metros?
Service industries are increasingly important in international trade and offer additional paths to economic development. There are many opportunities to expand trade in services between South Africa and other African countries. Improvements in urban...
Working Paper
Aiding education? The effect of international aid on local educational enrolment in Nigeria
Education is associated with a range of positive micro and macro effects. It is hence no surprise that donors have recently increased the amount of official development aid specifically focused on restoring and maintaining education in less-developed...
Working Paper
Agro-processing and horticultural exports from Africa
Sub-Saharan African exports of horticultural and processed agricultural products are growing in line with the major shift towards these products in world markets. Continued growth in these exports may be vitally important for expanding returns from...
Working Paper
Sectoral shifts and labour market outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa
Using the Economic Transformation Database, this paper attempts to assess the magnitude of structural transformation and the effects of sectoral shifts due to structural transformation on the labour market performance of 18 sub-Saharan African...