Which structural reforms affect labour productivity growth in developing countries? This paper answers this question by combining the local projections method and the inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (LP-IPWRA) method. We find that financial reforms, trade reforms, and product...

The paper investigates the determinants of productivity growth in China. It also analyses the sustainability of the country's industrial growth by estimating sectoral productivity, accounting for energy usage and emission since the start of the market-oriented reforms in the late 1970s. The...

Does foreign aid promote aggregate economic growth? In contrast to widespread perceptions, academic studies of this question have been rapidly converging towards a positive answer. We employ a simulation approach to (i) validate the coherence of recent empirics and (ii) calculate plausible...

In considering pathways to industrialization in the twenty-first century, cognisance needs to be taken of the fact that many countries have actually been deindustrializing. This paper analyses deindustrialization experiences internationally, by decomposing changes in the level and share of...

The present paper sheds new light on the growth implications of gender inequalities in the Moroccan labour market. We confront two different approaches. The first one is based on firm data to estimate gender complementarity in production and uses this information for simulations based on a...

This paper analyses the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in South Africa over the 1996-2019 period. We identify personal income tax shocks using a narrative approach and incorporate these shocks in a proxySVAR model. Our analysis shows that permanent changes in...

In recent decades, the impact of South African foreign direct investment in Africa has been captured by research and policy. This paper investigates linkages and spillover effects of South African foreign direct investment in Botswana and Kenya. The study uses primary data to investigate...

Agriculture plays an important role in terms of employment and its contribution to gross domestic product in many African countries. Thus, any policy initiative targeted towards poverty reduction in Africa should consider the agricultural sector as the major priority area. Unfortunately, the...

Resource mobilization continues to be an important policy challenge for developing economies, raising questions as to what determines differences in saving behaviour across countries. Using a panel of 47 economies with at least 40 years of continuous time series data, we causally identify, using...

This paper uses firm-level data and a news-based measure of economic policy uncertainty to provide empirical evidence that economic policy uncertainty has a negative impact on firm-level investment in South Africa. Firms' investment decisions in response to uncertainty reflect firms'...