Given Sub-Saharan Africa's enormous resource needs for growth, poverty reduction, and other Millennium Development Goals, the development community has little choice but to continue to explore new sources of financing, innovative private-to-private sector solutions, and public-private...

The authors use firm-level survey data from the manufacturing sector in 20 Sub-Saharan African countries to explore the links between labor market regulations and net job creation. A first look at firm characteristics, perceptions, and the dynamics of employment at the firm level suggests that...

The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) is the flagship of U.S. commercial and development policy with Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper looks at the impact of the trade preferences that are the central element of AGOA on African countries' exports to the U.S. and puts them in the perspective...

Evidence for road expansion and electrification as drivers of job creation is limited and mixed, with most studies having considered either one or the other, and only in isolation. This paper estimates the average and heterogeneous impacts of road and electricity investments and the interaction...

This paper investigates the characteristics of resource-backed lending across Sub-Saharan Africa. To shed light on this type of lending, the paper presents new information on 30 resource-backed loans between 2004 and 2018, identified through publicly available information. These loans were...

Across Sub-Saharan African countries with customary tenure systems and low levels of documented land ownership, there are limited nationally representative insights on men and women landowners' rights over land. Variations in institutions and norms governing land ownership further complicate...

Against the background of high inflation, climate shocks, and concerns about rising food insecurity, this study documents the state of economic sentiments and expectations of households in five African countries-Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda-that are home to 36 percent of...

Forest fires are among the main drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in the drylands of Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper uses remote sensing data on forest fires and remaining tree cover to estimate the effectiveness of a project targeted at reducing fire incidences in twelve protected...

This paper quantifies the impact of drought on household consumption for five main agroecological zones in Africa, developing vulnerability (or damage) functions of the relationship between rainfall deficits and poverty. Damage functions are a key element in models that quantify the risk of...

Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation—labor allocation and labor productivity—in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor...