The poor performance of many African economies has been associated with low growth of exports in general and of manufacturing exports in particular. In this paper, we draw on micro-evidence of manufacturing firms in five African countries, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa and Nigeria, to...

This paper highlights the links between enterprises in poor countries, risk, and employment outcomes. Concentrating on how formality and flexibility can be combined to ensure that the effects of risk are mitigated for firms and households, the author details the concepts of formality and its...

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 support is...

The focus of this study is an analysis of firm productivity in Ghana, based on panel of firms surveyed between 1996 and 2002, as well as other information. The analysis focuses on identifying the drivers of productivity and the factors behind the increasing in formalization and the lack of...

One of the most striking features of economic growth is the process of structural change whereby the share of agriculture in GDP decreases as countries develop. The cross-country growth literature typically estimates an aggregate homogeneous production function or convergence regression model...

While the numbers with completed tertiary level education are low in Africa, both relative to other countries and in absolute terms, they have been growing very rapidly. Three questions are addressed in this paper. The first is how higher education links to other forms of capital accumulation in...

Job creation is a central part of the policy of almost all African countries. The problems are particularly acute in Nigeria where over the period of the early 2000s there was a substantial decline in the number of private wage jobs. While policy discussion focuses on the extent of unemployment...

In this paper, we use a three-period panel of Tanzanian households to explore the determinants of earnings and earnings growth from 2004 to 2006.  In doing so, we draw particular attention to the role of education and to the importance of heterogeneity between more and less formal...

The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis.  Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana.  The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the...