This report provides an overview of current research on and knowledge about employment trends and policies in sub-Saharan Africa. Access to productive employment is seen as essential for poverty reduction and the inclusion of the poor in wider society. Productive employment is characterised by...

This paper examines the discovery process of a recent and extraordinarily successful, nontraditional, export activity in developing country - namely the flower industry in Ethiopia. To be able to break into non-traditional exports, developing countries do not need to invent new products, but...

This paper addresses two prominent issues on the development of small enterprises in Africa. Which factors inhibit or foster innovation activities in small enterprises? Do innovators create more jobs? We use a large set of microenterprises survey data from Ethiopia that comprise 1000...

This study focuses on innovation in a cluster of informal shoemaking firms in Ethiopia - namely the Mercato footwear cluster. It examines how differently those firms are embedded in networks and how heterogeneous they are in absorptive capacity, and how this heterogeneity affects their...

Due to recent revival of interest on industrial policy, there have been many attempts to design policy tools to facilitate the successful emergence of new industry, which in turn may help developing countries to transform structurally to a developmental path. Often, however, the existing policy...

On 1 January 2005, the international trade in textile and clothing was freed from the quota restrictions that had persisted for more than four decades. This study tests one of the predictions that countries effectively constrained by quotas in the major world markets will increase their exports...

Although there has been considerable research on firm-level technological capability building in the context of developing economies, there is a scarcity of studies which examine this issue in multinational enterprises socially motivated businesses located in less developed economies.This paper...

This study explores the influence of vulnerability on migration intentions within the context of Afghanistan. While it is commonplace to conceptualize migration as being driven by certain economic-related factors, it is reasonable to assume that in an insecure setting like Afghanistan the...

In a time of economic downturn and the recession in Europe, a migrants labour market position is even more precarious, and may influence their economic homeland engagement. Based on the IS Academy, Migration and Development A World in Motion Project survey data3, I focus on Afghan, Burundian,...

This paper focuses on the occurrence of high-growth firms in relation to human capital and innovation. High-growth firms are rather exceptional and temporary phenomena and occur in the upper tail of the conditional firm growth distribution. Using quantile regression we study how human capital...