The shortages of entrepreneurial skills have lowered search effectiveness of potential young entrepreneurs and the rate of youth start-ups. Our paper contributes to closing a gap in the entrepreneurship and development literature with a model of costly firm creation and skill differences between...

With the year 2015 – the MDG finishing line – approaching, post-2015 goals as they impact Africa need to be firmed. The goal of ending extreme poverty remains paramount. Globally, the World Bank set goals to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to promote shared prosperity in every society. We...

This paper develops an adaptive learning model under uncertainty that examines evolution of capital account polices over time and across developing regions. In the framework, countries' past experiences and IMF programs influence policymakers' beliefs about the impact of capital account...

Since mid-2000s, Ethiopia has been one of the fastest growing countries in the world. However, productive entrepreneurship in high-value added activities has made limited contributions to this growth, in part because of a weak business environment. Moreover, the low-productive firms in the...

Zimbabwe faces growth and external competitiveness challenges, as indicated by its low trend growth and investment, declining share in the world exports, high current account deficits, and external debt. The stock-flow approach to the equilibrium exchange rate reveals that the real exchange rate...

This paper presents evidence on the making of the middle class in Africa by exploiting a comparable micro data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for thirty-seven countries over two decades consisting of over seven hundred thousand household histories. We constructed a pseudo-panel to...

Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia face challenges competing on the global markets, as shown by their relatively low and stagnant export shares. The limited export competitiveness has hampered external demand, growth and employment. Applying, for the first time to North Africa, the stock-flow approach...

Limited access of entrepreneurs to credit constrains the creation and growth of private firms. In Africa, access to credit is particularly limited for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to unclear property rights and the lack of assets that can be used as collateral. This paper presents a...

The unemployment rate in Estonia rose sharply in 2010 to one of the highest levels in the EU, after the country entered a severe recession in 2008. While the rate declined relatively rapidly in 2011, it remained high especially for the less educated. In 2009, the Employment Contract Law relaxed...

Drawing on the 2007 and 2010 Swaziland Labor Force Surveys, this paper provides first systematic evidence on recent youth employment challenges in Swaziland, a small, land-locked, middle-income country with one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Africa. The paper first documents the...