Employing a unique dataset that covers households from six West African capitals, this paper provides new evidence on the demand for informal sector products and services. We first investigate whether demand linkages exist between formal and informal products and distribution channels, and...

This paper deals with the question of how responsive farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are to changes in incentives. Employing Johansen's multivariate cointegration approach, it investigates for ten selected SSA countries the long-run effect of pricing policies, macroeconomic distortions, and...

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...

The paper measures income elasticities of demand for manufacturing imports in China since 1990 disaggregated by major trading partners such as the US, Japan, Germany and rest of the EU. German exporters seem to have benefited from the hightest demand elasticities. The paper proposes explanatory...

Using information on a panel of multinational firms operating in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005, we find that labour demand in domestic multinationals is less sensitive to own labour costs changes than in foreign multinationals. This difference in wage elasticity of labour demand persists...

The relationship between nutrient intake and wealth of poor households continues to be an issue of huge policy relevance. In this paper, we contribute to the ongoing debate on the nutrient-income elasticity using a sample of ultra-poor households with orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in...

Das Papier unterzieht Studien der Weltbank über Verlauf und Ergebnis von Strukturanpassung in Subsahara Afrika einer kritischen Würdigung. Zwei zentralen Behauptungen der Bank wird widersprochen: Strukturanpassung hätte zu einem Abbau ökonomischer Renten geführt und man könne...

We analyze in this paper determinants of voluntary knowledge transfer from foreign investors to their local suppliers in 19 Sub- Saharan African countries using data from the 2010 Africa Investor Survey by UNIDO. We argue that not all backward linkages entail the same potential for spillovers...