Usage of health facilities in Ethiopia is among the lowest in the world; raising usage rates is probably critical for improving health outcomes. The government has diagnosed the principal problem as the lack of primary health facilities and is devoting a large share of the health budget to...

In this paper, we use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Measures of firm-level efficiency using stochastic production frontier models are constructed for the period 1992 to 1995. We find that there are...

Firm-level data for the manufacturing sector in Africa, presented in this paper, shows very low levels of investment. A positive effect from profits onto investment is identified in a flexible accelerator specification of the investment function controlling for firm fixed effects. There is...

In this paper two sets of issues are addressed using panel data from the manufacturing sector of five African countries. First, how high are the returns to human relative to physical capital. Second, what is the relative importance of technology and endowments of human and physical capital in...

Civil wars dramatically reduce income. Peace might therefore be expected to generate a dividend which both the government and the private sector can spend. Paradoxically, those civil wars which are prolonged and therefore do most damage create only small instant peace dividends. Income has...

This paper examines the contractual practices of African manufacturing firms using survey data collected in Burundi, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Descriptive statistics and econometric results are presented. They show that contractual flexibility is pervasive and...

In the 1980s conditional lending for structural adjustment in developing countries moved the IMF beyond its role of macroeconomic crisis management. Fund-supported adjustment programmes have often been flawed by a lack of distributional analysis and by poor sequencing of reforms, notably...

This paper examines the contractual practices of African manufacturing firms using survey data collected in Burundi, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Descriptive statistics and econometric results are presented. They show that contractual flexibility is pervasive and that...

The paper investigates the effects of ethnic diversity on economic performance and the risk of violent conflict. Diversity has various detrimental microeconomic effects, tending to reduce public sector performance, increase patronage, and lower the level of trust among individuals. However,...