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...

<title>A<sc>bstract</sc> </title> This article provides a case study of the Ethiopian flower export industry which successfully emerged at time when the EU market (main destination) was already characterised by increasingly stringent standards and delivery requirements. Entering this market required a multitude of...

We use census panel data on Ethiopian manufacturing firms to analyze the connections between enterprise agglomeration, firm-level output prices and physical productivity. We find a negative and statistically significant relationship between the agglomerat

We use firm-level data for the Ethiopian manufacturing sector matched with commodity-level data on tariffs to examine the effect of trade liberalization on firm performance during the 1997-2005 period.  We find relatively large positive effects of tariff reductions on total factor productivity,...