Country Economic Memorandum
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Publication
Ghana Rising: Accelerating Economic Transformation and Creating Jobs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-10)Ghana has been a rising growth star and a beacon of hope in West Africa. Strong economic growth over the past two decades led to a near doubling of GDP per capita, lifting the country through the threshold for middle-income status in 2011. GDP per capita grew by an average of 3 percent per year over the past two decades, putting Ghana in the top ten fastest growing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A rising tide has tended to lift all boats. Poverty rates more than halved between 1998 and 2016, and the extreme poverty rate declined from 36.0 percent in 1991 to 8.2 percent in 2016. The net primary school enrollment rate rose from 62.5 percent in 2000 to 86.0 percent in 2019. This progress has motivated the government’s goal to lift the country to high-income status by 2057. The focus of this Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) is to review options for Ghana to create enough higher quality jobs through economic transformation. Economic transformation, or inclusive productivity growth, occurs as people and resources shift from lower to higher productivity activities. It raises household incomes and living standards, thereby lifting people out of poverty. It can be achieved through the movement of workers and other resources between firms and sectors, or through workers staying within existing firms that benefit from within-firm productivity growth by adopting better technologies and capabilities. -
Publication
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 4. Infrastructure and Structural Change in the Lake Chad Region
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)This paper focuses on the impact of infrastructure on economic development for the countries around the Lake Chad area, an economically- and socially-integrated area in north-west Africa that has development potential, but which has been undermined by multiple and interrelated drivers of fragility, conflict, and violence. The Lake Chad region comprises a set of administrative areas across Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria that surround Lake Chad, with an estimated 17 million to 19 million people, who are primarily involved in agriculture and fishing activities. The region has one of the largest concentrations of extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and the world and lags in human development outcomes and access to key public services. The paper analyzes the impact of infrastructure in Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria, from a national and regional perspective, and with a particular focus on the Lake Chad area. The paper is structured as follows. Section two presents the data. Section three presents the empirical strategy and results. Section four develops a spatial general-equilibrium model to produce counterfactuals for more regional integration. Section five concludes. -
Publication
Firm Productivity and Economic Growth in Turkey
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-04-29)Turkey’s pace of income convergence has globally been one of the most remarkable of the past fifteen years. Sustaining growth and improvements in living standards in Turkey will require higher productivity in the economy. The Turkey Productivity Report (2019) provides an in-depth analysis of firm productivity in Turkey and how this adds up to economic growth in the country. The report has six parts. The first two provide macro and micro diagnosis of productivity in the economy – what are the productivity trends, how have these affected economic growth, what firms in what industry are the most productive, and are they absorbing an increasing or decreasing share of resources? From here the report analyzes specific policy areas that might explain firm productivity dynamics in Turkey – namely firms’ integration in the global economy, access to innovation support, the quality of human capital, and the business environment including competition. The report finds that economic integration and innovation have boosted firm-level productivity, though reforms could further accelerate these positive impacts. Productivity gains could accelerate the demand for more educated and skilled workers. The growth of more productive firms could in turn also be accelerated through reforms that increase competition and reduce regulatory burden.