Unlike in Asia, the manufacturing sector has not (yet) become a driver of structural change in Africa. One common explanation is that the natural resource-focus of many African economies leads to Dutch disease effects. To test this argument for the case of newly found oil in Ghana we develop a...

Growth models of the Dutch disease, such as those of Krugman (1987), Matsuyama (1992), Sachs and Warner (1995) and Gylfason et al. (1999), explain why resource abundance may reduce growth. However, the literature also raises a new question: if the use of resource wealth hurts productivity...

The paper examines the interactions between economic integration and population agglomeration in a middle product economy displaying neoclassical growth. There are two vertically integrated economies. Each consists of a large number of final good competitive firms operating plants in both...

This paper develops a two-sector model for a renewable natural resource based economy. Pareto efficient results show the optimal harvesting rate that allows for sustained long-run optimal growth, which is upper-bounded by the biological rate of reproduction. Regulation prevents from resource...

In most resource-driven developing economies, a mineral-based formal sector and an informal resource sector (such as charcoal production) constitute the main economic activities, from which local dwellers derive their livelihoods. The paper examines the coexistence of formal and informal...

The most cited paper ever published by the Journal of African Economies is Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner’s "Sources of Slow Growth in African Economies." The paper advises that despite decades of slow growth in Africa there should be considerable optimism regarding Africa's future; if it...

In this paper we present the so-called Schumpeterian approach to economic growth, in which growth is primarily driven by entrepreneurial innovations that are themselves influenced by the institutional environment. We argue that this more micro-founded approach both, questions the old divisions...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

An AIDS epidemic threatens Ethiopia with a long wave of premature adult mortality, and thus with an enduring setback to capital formation and economic growth. The authors develop a two-sector model with three overlapping generations and intersectorally mobile labor, in which young adults...