The Ghana cocoa market has been extensively liberalised over the period since the mid 1980s. Three issues have been prominent in microeconomic research on the effects of liberalisation on agriculture. The first has been the size of any supply response, the second has been the effect on producers...

We analyse the costs of a monetary union in West Africa by means of asymmetric aggegate demand and aggregate supply shocks. Previous studies have estimated the shocks with the VAR model. We discuss the limits of this approach and apply a new technique based on the dynamic factor model. The...

This paper presents a dynamic factor model in which the extracted factors and shocks are given a clear economic interpretation. The economic interpretation of the factors is obtained by means of a set of over-identifying loading restrictions, while the structural shocks are estimated following...

This paper looks at the relationship between natural resource degradation and income diversification for fishing communities in southern Benin. We find that the higher the degradation of the fishery stock, the more fishers diversify their income away from the fishery sector. However, given the...