Summary Manufacturing enterprises in rural and urban Ethiopia are compared to examine how location and investment climate characteristics affect performance. Urban firms are larger, more capital intensive and have higher labor productivity than rural firms, yet there is no strong evidence of...

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008. Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion of households had to adjust...

This paper assesses the impact of risk and shocks on non-farm enterprise development in rural Ethiopia using a matched household–enterprise–community dataset augmented with precipitation based measures of risk. The likelihood of running a non-farm firm and the returns to running such firms...

We find that heterogeneity in production functions is an important source of variation in firm outcomes in Africa, and we find it is more important than education or productivity in explaining differences in output per worker. There is some technological diversity within Africa, with more...

Summary In this paper we ask what can account for the continuing strong preference for academic education in Africa where the level of development is so low and there are few wage jobs and which form of educational investment, the academic or vocational, is most profitable. We argue that the...

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