The barrier model of productivity growth suggests that individual country productivity is related to the world technology frontier disturbed by national barriers. We offer a country study of the barrier model exploiting the dramatic changes in the linkages to the world economy in South Africa....

The analysis of the effect of tariffs for labor productivity faces the challenge of tariff policy endogeneity. Tariff policy is designed to promote economic development and the industrial sector tariff structure may reflect characteristics of the industries protected. We seek to identify the...

70 percent of the rural population in sub-Saharan Africa does not use adequate sanitation facilities. In rural Benin, as much as 95 percent of the population has no access to improved sanitation. This paper explores why households remain without latrines analyzing a representative sample of 2000...

This paper analyzes the effect of lifting primary school fees on educational attainment in Uganda. After the abolishment of school fees in 1997, the enrollment rate more than doubled. Two decades later, however, we know little about the effect of the policy on educational attainment. With recent...

Soil fertility depletion is considered the main biophysical limiting factor to increasing per capita food production for most smallholder farmers in Africa. The adoption and diffusion of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs), as a way to tackle this impediment, has become an important issue...

In this study, we assess the economy-wide effects of biofuel investment in Ethiopia, with a focus on the external sector. The Government of Ethiopia has been revising its energy policy to switch from imported fossil oil to domestically produced biofuels, partly in response to climate change and...

We investigate how carbon taxes combined with output-based rebating (OBR) in an open economy perform in interaction with the carbon policies of a large neighboring trading partner. Analytical results suggest that whether the purpose of the OBR policy is to compensate firms for carbon tax burdens...

Climate effects of unilateral carbon policies are undermined by carbon leakage. To counteract leakage and increase global cost-effectiveness carbon tariffs can be imposed on the emissions embodied in imports from non-regulating regions. We present a theoretical analysis on the economic...

A review of the theoretical literature on optimal indirect taxation reveals that analytical arguments in favor of uniform indirect taxation seem weak and rather unrealistic; hence determining the optimal tax structure remains an empirical issue. However, reviewing the empirical contributions...

Unilateral climate policy induces carbon leakage through the relocation of emission-intensive and trade-exposed industries to regions with no or more lenient emission regulation. Both analytical and numerical studies suggest that emission pricing combined with border carbon adjustment is a...