Total Factor Productivity (TFP) accounts for a sizeable proportion of the income and growth differences across countries. Two challenges remain to researchers aiming to explain these differences: on the one hand, TFP growth is hard to measure; on the other hand, model uncertainty hampers...

We study implications of persistence of shocks in total factor productivity (TFP) growth under Bayesian framework for a set of African countries over the period 1970-2003. Contrary to convention, we find that stochastic unit root is present for most of the African countries and that there is...

Economists typically evaluate policies based on how such policies affect individuals’ utilities. We follow this approach by taking a welfarist view of the USA’s espoused policy of promoting liberty in other parts of the world. However, we take a nuanced view by investigating the type of...

In this paper, we use stochastic frontier analysis to examine whether differences in the transfer and absorption of technology help to explain cross-country differences in national efficiency levels in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1970–2010. We find that trade policy on openness,...

This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on public sector fiscal behaviour in Côte d'Ivoire. A special interest is the relationship between aid, debt servicing and debt, given that Côte d'Ivoire is a highly indebted country. The theoretical model employed differs from those of previous...

This paper investigates the determinants of private investment in Senegal over the period of 1970-2000. It first tests the variables for unit root using two, relatively, new tests namely the Dickey-Fuller generalised least square de-trending test proposed by Elliot et al. (1996) and the...