We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-sector of developing and advanced countries.  Regressions of either private-sector employment rates or unemployment rates on two measures of...

Nigerian data from the early 2000s indicates that formal sector earnings are about 70% higher than informal sector earnings but, for men, part of this is due to an educational composition effect.  The returns to education are lower in the informal sector than in the formal sector, but mainly at...

This paper constructs country-level aggregates of trade facilitation measures from firm-level responses in the Enterprise Surveys and compares them with the Doing Business indicators, the Logistics Performance Index and the Enabling Trade Index.  Correlations between the data sources are low...

Free trade agreements (FTAs) lead to a rise in bilateral trade even if the signatories include developing countries.  Furthermore, the percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for South-South agreements than for North-South agreements.  The results are robust across a number of gravity...

Drawing on a new and comprehensive measure of logistics quality, our gravity model suggests logistics in the exporting and partner-country can have an important impact on bilateral exports.  A one standard deviation improvement in the exporter's logistics quality, which for example would...

Elasticities of demand and supply for South African manufactured exports are estimated using a vector error correction model in order to address simultaneity and non-stationarity issues. Demand is highly price-elastic, with elasticities ranging from –3 to –6. The...

Commentators claim that a shortage of skills in South Africa is constraining output and that a rise in skill supply would benefit less skilled occupations. This assumes or implies skilled and unskilled labour are complements. Hicks Elasticities of Complementarity and elasticities of factor price...

An industry in decline provides an appropriate setting for the theory that mergers and acquisitions destroy implicit contracts and allow for the shedding of excess labour. We test this theory using provincial data from the South African gold mining industry, which has been in decline over the...

Do better trade logistics reduce trade costs, raising a country's exports?  Yes, but the magnitude of the effect depends on country size.  Applying a new gravity model to a comprehensive logistics index, we find that an average-sized country would raise exports by about 46% after a...

We present a gravity model that accounts for multilateral resistance, firm heterogeneity and country-selection into trade, while accommodating asymmetries in trade flows.  A new equation for the proportion of exporting firms takes a gravity form: the extensive margin is also affected by...