It has been argued that Africa will not be able to export manufactures as it lacks the necessary skills. This study uses panel data from Ghana to ask how skills have impacted on manufacturing investment and exports in the 1990s. Two dimensions of skills are defined and measure. The first is that...

The removal of high levels of protection combined with substantial real devaluations have changed the environment in which Ghanaian manufacturing firms have operated in the 1990s. The changes in output, composition and productivity, which have occurred over this period, are examined in this...

This article examines the contractual practices of African manufacturing firms using survey data collected in Burundi, Cameroon, Cote d'lvoire, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Descriptive statistics and econometric results are presented. They show that contractual flexibility is pervasive and that...

In this paper two issues, which have been the subject of much multidisciplinary research, are investigated. The first is whether consumption expenditure can be treated as a measure of welfare. The second is whether larger households can be viewed as richer than smaller ones. These issues are...

We use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to investigate whether exporting impacts on efficiency, and whether efficient firms self-select into the export market. Based on simultaneous estimation of a production function and an export regression, our...