This paper uses uniquely matched household, enterprise and community survey data from four major regions in rural Ethiopia to characterize the performance, constraints and opportunities of nonfarm enterprises. The nonfarm enterprise sector is sizeable, particularly important for women, and plays...

In the early 1990s the World Bank launched the Regional Program on Enterprise Development in several African countries, a key component of which was the collection of manufacturing firm-level data. In this paper the authors review the research based on the data sets generated by these and...

The authors model the duration of large-scale, violent civil conflicts, applying hazard functions to a comprehensive data set on such conflicts for the period 1960-99. They find that the duration of conflicts is determined by a substantially different set of variables than those that determine...

This paper compares and contrasts the performance of rural and urban manufacturing firms in Ethiopia to assess the impact of market integration and the investment climate on firm performance. Rural firms are shown to operate in isolated markets, have poor access to infrastructure and a...

Patterns of correlation in innovation and contractual practices among manufacturing firms in Ethiopia and Sudan are documented. Network data that indicate whether any two firms in the utilized sample do business with each other, buy inputs from a common supplier, or sell output to a common...

By developing a simple theoretical model of the impact of market integration on sectoral output and employment in a poor rural setting, this paper demonstrates that trade can induce asymmetric growth. Under certain, plausible, assumptions, the non-farm sector will grow much faster than the...

Since the development of human capital theory, countless estimates of the economic benefits of investing in education for the individual have been published. While it is a universal fact that in all countries of the world the more education one has the higher his or her earnings, it is...

One of the most striking features of economic growth is the process of structural change whereby the share of agriculture in GDP decreases as countries develop. The cross-country growth literature typically estimates an aggregate homogeneous production function or convergence regression model...

The Addis Ababa Integrated Housing Development Program aims to tackle the housing shortage and unemployment that prevail in Addis Ababa by deploying and supporting small and medium scale enterprises to construct low-cost housing using technologies novel for Ethiopia. The motivation for such...