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...

This study presents novel evidence regarding the role of regional internet infrastructure in reducing regional per capita income disparities. We base our study on the assumptions that 1 the diffusion of information homogenizes regional economies through reducing the dissimilarities in...

This paper analyses the current burden of obesity in the female population of Jordan on a national scale and examines the factors associated with it. Demographics and Health Surveys DHS were used for the years 2002, 2007 and 2009 covering a total of 23,197 women, 15-49 years of age, and...

This paper analyses how corruption affects firms ownership of intellectual property titles that relate to firms technological, organizational and further innovation efforts quality certificates and patents. Using firm-level data covering 48 developing and emerging countries, we show corruption...

A major international transmission channel of productivity increases is trade in intermediate products and services. This paper analyses international spillovers at the industry level and for the first time investigates effects from the services sector in this framework. The analysis makes use...

The use of fiscal policy instruments to stimulate private RD is widespread and important in some countries like Spain. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of RD tax incentives on knowledge capital accumulation in Spanish manufacturing firms using an unbalanced panel and compare the...