Africa's industrial progress has been disappointing. With the exception of South African auto components and garments, both of which have benefited from special incentives, Africa exports almost no manufactured goods that are not based on the processing of raw materials. Despite considerable...

Our central question is whether African countries can break into global manufacturing in a substantial way. Using a newly-constructed panel of firm-level data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, we look at labor costs in a range of low and middle income countries in Africa and elsewhere....

Several studies have highlighted that African manufacturing wages are higher than comparator countries at similar levels of development, which contributes to the continent’s lower levels of manufacturing competitiveness. This paper derives unit labor costs - average wages relative to...