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Publications (56)
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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 and more advanced developing and developed countries...
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– A progress report
This paper reviews integration among the eight African Regional Economic Communities by comparing their characteristics and progress with three other South–South Regional Integration Arrangements. Three conclusions emerge: (i) slow progress towards meeting overly ambitious objectives; (ii) small...
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– The case of the mobile money transfer industry
The mobile money transfer industry has been the most successful information and communications technology-enabled service in Kenya, having recorded an exponential growth relative to its neighbours within the East Africa region. This could be attributed to Kenya’s status as a leading commercial and...
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– From devastation to services-first transformation
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 infrastructure and public institutions have been rebuilt. This...
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– A portrait of capacity and competition in various market segments
Sub-Saharan Africa’s air transport, though low in overall volume when compared to other regions in the world, has experienced significant growth in the last decade, both in international and domestic traffic. The sector, in part because of its relatively small size, still faces the challenges of...
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– Opening markets to create opportunities
This paper reviews the role of services in development and growth, the potential role of trade in services as a driver of the productivity performance of sectors that use services as inputs, and the links between services policies and domestic trade costs. Barriers to trade in services have direct...
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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 the position of global lead firms and increases...
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Despite Tanzania’s rapid recent growth, the vast majority of employment creation has been in informal services. This paper addresses the role that different subsectors of formal and informal services have played in Tanzania’s growth. It finds that subsectors such as trade services contribute...
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– Implications for Ethiopia’s industrialization
Although the manufacturing sector is known to have a unique role in structural transformation, the industries without smokestacks that include tradable services (e.g., IT, tourism, transport), horticulture, and agro-industry can provide new opportunities for export development in low-income...
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We use unique high-frequency Government of Uganda and Government of Rwanda tax administration datasets to map the characteristics of ‘industries without smokestacks’ in East Africa. First, we find firm size appears to be crucial for successful industries without smokestacks in services and agro...
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The agro-processing industry and its potential for structural transformation of the Ghanaian economy
The paper explores the potential of Ghana’s agro-processing industry in contributing to the development and structural transformation of the economy. Although the industry is not well advanced, a number of factors are discussed which make it a viable sector to lead the economy towards sustainable...
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– Telecommunication and ICT-based services trade
This paper provides a basic understanding of the nature of emerging key information and communication technologies, and establishes the distance of countries from high-quality access to the internet—the necessary threshold one needs to cross in order to make use of such technologies. The paper...
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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 African agriculture and for increasing its overall...
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Significant progress has been made by the East African Community partner states in implementing the East African Community customs union. Trade within the East African Community is now free from import duties, and partner states have adopted a three-band common external tariff. This paper assesses...
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– Mozambique country case study
Under the current international economic conditions, where Asian countries are strong competitors in the manufacturing commodities, low-income countries like Mozambique could attempt to compete in industries without smokestacks. Fruits and vegetables, agro-processing goods, and various tradable...
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– An overview
The South African services sector is large and growing. This coupled with declining employment shares in manufacturing and mining (i.e. deindustrialization) suggests that South Africa is a de facto service-orientated economy. Employment patterns in services reveal a segmentation that is...
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– The case of East Africa
In East Africa, there have been numerous concerns over logistics efficiency. Among them, the regional integration of the trucking industry is perceived as a major problem. This paper utilizes a combination of unpublished data surveys and published data (mainly port data) to assess the extent of...
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– A service economy in need of an export boost
This paper first summarizes the macroeconomic and trade performance of Senegal, emphasizing the limits of traditional exports. It then focuses on three export sectors which have had some success in the past and have good potential for future growth: tourism, horticulture and information technology...
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We conducted a systematic review to identify policy interventions that improve education quality and student learning in developing countries. Relying on a theory of change typology, we highlight three main drivers of change of education quality: first, supply-side capability interventions that...
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This paper develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resort to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re-election. Using a panel dataset of 51 African countries covering the period 1980 to 2012...
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Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper examines...
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– Comparing Design and Implementation Errors Across Alternative Mechanisms
Identifying the poorest for selection into social transfer programmes is a major challenge facing programme implementers. An innovative cash transfer programme in northern Kenya trialed three targeting mechanisms to learn lessons about which approach is most effective at minimizing inclusion and...
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– Aggregating Impacts of School-Feeding Programmes on Education, Health and Nutrition: Two Proposed Methodologies
School-feeding is an important intervention to attract children to school and augment their learning. The benefits of school-feeding cover several domains. Key to the overall assessment of these benefits is understanding how different implementation models compare to each other and to other...
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– The Impact of Oportunidades’ Electronic Payment System in Mexico
This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico’s Oportunidades programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via a bank account is found to have implications in terms of reallocation between saving...
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The reduction in deaths from diarrheal diseases is one of the significant public health successes of the twentieth century. That said, the disease still accounts for a significant burden of childhood morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Progress made in the past has, to a...
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– The WDR+20 Landscape of Core and Supportive Functions
This paper discusses shifts in development assistance for health (DAH) since 1990, analyses the nature of the current distribution of funding, and considers future implications. Based on Jamison et al. (1998) and Frenk and Moon (2013), we introduce an ‘essential functions’ framework, which provides...
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– Challenges and Opportunities
This paper primarily focuses on how global funding has supported interventions that have proven to be successful in reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality around the world. The growth rate of development assistance targeted towards these specific interventions has varied greatly over the...
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– the Role of Aid
Financing and the role of aid within the water sector are poorly understood. We estimate the levels of spending achieved in developing countries during the Millennium Development Goals period to be US$80 billion per year. Aid represented a substantial proportion of total sector financing in sub...
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Preventable and treatable childhood diseases, notably acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases are the first and second leading causes of death and morbidity among young children in developing countries. The fact that a large proportion of child deaths are caused by these diseases is...
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This paper analyses the distribution of total aid and aid to the social sectors between 2009 and 2011. Its key findings are four-fold. First, despite the stated objectives of donors, total aid disbursements are broadly neutral, favouring neither the most deprived nor relatively well-off countries...
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– What Matters for Learning in East Africa?
Raising schooling quality in low-income countries is a pressing challenge. Substantial research has considered the impact of cutting class sizes on skills acquisition. Considerably less attention has been given to the extent to which peer effects, which refer to class composition, also may affect...
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– Implementation of the New Aid Effectiveness Agenda in Health and Education in Zambia
There is a growing interest in the debate on aid effectiveness for assessing the impact of aid not only on economic growth and poverty reduction, but also on intermediate outcomes such as health and education. This paper reviews evidence from recent in-depth country work on the impact of government...
Displaying 32 of 56 results