Publication: More than Copper : Toward the Diversification and Stabilization of Zambian Exports
Loading...
Published
2015-01
ISSN
Date
2015-01-07
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper analyzes Zambian export patterns using a new transaction-level trade data set for the period 1999-2011. The data show that, in international comparison, Zambian exports are exceptionally concentrated (on mining products). This reliance has been increasing in recent years. Zambia's exports are also characterized by a high level of churning of firms and products. Multivariate models of survival probabilities suggest that exchange rate volatility and difficult access to imported inputs significantly inhibit diversified and stable exports. The econometric analysis is complemented with a qualitative study of the Zambian export sector. The analysis concludes that one of the main policy levers for unleashing Zambia's full potential as an exporter is by facilitating access to imported inputs. Additional measures that ease foreign exchange transactions, simplify export and certification requirements, and increase the predictability of Zambia's trade regime could be effective to promote Zambia's nontraditional exports.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Brulhart, Marius; Dihel, Nora; Kukenova, Madina. 2015. More than Copper : Toward the Diversification and Stabilization of Zambian Exports. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7151. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/21148 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication The Economic Value of Weather Forecasts: A Quantitative Systematic Literature Review(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-10)This study systematically reviews the literature that quantifies the economic benefits of weather observations and forecasts in four weather-dependent economic sectors: agriculture, energy, transport, and disaster-risk management. The review covers 175 peer-reviewed journal articles and 15 policy reports. Findings show that the literature is concentrated in high-income countries and most studies use theoretical models, followed by observational and then experimental research designs. Forecast horizons studied, meteorological variables and services, and monetization techniques vary markedly by sector. Estimated benefits even within specific subsectors span several orders of magnitude and broad uncertainty ranges. An econometric meta-analysis suggests that theoretical studies and studies in richer countries tend to report significantly larger values. Barriers that hinder value realization are identified on both the provider and user sides, with inadequate relevance, weak dissemination, and limited ability to act recurring across sectors. Policy reports rely heavily on back-of-the-envelope or recursive benefit-transfer estimates, rather than on the methods and results of the peer-reviewed literature, revealing a science-to-policy gap. These findings suggest substantial socioeconomic potential of hydrometeorological services around the world, but also knowledge gaps that require more valuation studies focusing on low- and middle-income countries, addressing provider- and user-side barriers and employing rigorous empirical valuation methods to complement and validate theoretical models.Publication The Marshall Plan: Then and Now(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-10-14)This paper is a product of the Development Policy Team, Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Geopolitical Risks and Trade(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-23)This paper studies the impact of geopolitical risks on international trade, using the Geopolitical Risk (GPR) index of Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) and an empirical gravity model. The impact of spikes in geopolitical risk on trade is negative, strong, and heterogeneous across sectors. The findings show that increases in geopolitical risk reduce trade by about 30 to 40 percent. These effects are equivalent to an increase of global tariffs of up to 14 percent. Services trade is most vulnerable to geopolitical risks, followed by agriculture, and the impact on manufacturing trade is moderate. These negative effects are partially mitigated by cultural and geographic proximity, as well as by the presence of trade agreements.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Financial Liberalization and Allocative Efficiency of Capital(2011-05-01)Financial liberalization may have a positive effect on growth not only through the increase in the quantity of the available funds, but also through a more efficient allocation of resources across firms and sectors. Despite this intuitive appeal, there is little empirical evidence on the positive effect of financial liberalization on capital allocation. The main difficulty of investigating the linkage between liberalization of financial markets and capital allocation efficiency lies in the fact that the efficiency of capital allocation is not directly observable. One way to address this issue is to evaluate the effect of financial liberalization within the Heckscher-Ohlin framework. Producing and exporting products inconsistent with a country's factor endowments constitutes a serious misallocation of the funds, which undermines competitiveness of the economy and inhibits its long run growth. This paper tests the allocative efficiency hypothesis by evaluating the effect of stock market liberalization on the survival of different product categories using export data for 91 countries over the period of 1975-2003. Preliminary results suggest that after liberalization of the domestic stock market, products employing intensively scarce factors exit at a relatively higher rate from a country's export portfolio. In other words, following liberalization episodes, a country tends to rebalance its export portfolio towards products consistent with its factor's endowments.Publication Patterns of Foreign Direct Investment Flows and Trade-Investment Inter-Linkages in Southern Africa : Linking Middle-Income and Low-Income Neighbors(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-05)This report discusses the patterns of foreign direct investment flows and trade-investment inter-linkages in Southern Africa. It will discuss how cross-border investment flows create a possible channel of growth spillover from South Africa and other MICs to LICs in the subregion, and identify the roles of subregional trade and investment flows in generating these neighborhood effects with LICs. After an introduction with background on the subregion of Southern Africa, Section 2 provides facts on the patterns of trade in Southern African countries to illustrate how much (or little) the Southern African subregion is integrated today and whether or not intraregional trade is growing. Section 3 presents aggregate trends in foreign direct investment flows (and stocks) in SSA, discusses how SASR is situated in such trends, and analyzes the emerging trends of intra-SASR cross-border investments, largely driven by South Africa. Section 4 analyzes trade-investment linkages in Southern Africa at the firm level. Section 5 discusses areas of domestic policies in enhancing trade and foreign direct investment in Southern Africa. Section 6 summarizes the findings from this analysis and discusses their policy implications.Publication ASEAN Integration Monitoring Report(Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat and the World Bank, 2013)The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a community of more than 600 million people living in ten countries in one of the most dynamic regions of the world. Consistent with this, ASEAN's share of world GDP and world trade has sharply increased over the past decades. In 2003, ASEAN's regional integration agenda was significantly deepened when ASEAN Member States adopted the ambitious goal of forming an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2015. These goals were crystallized in the highly specific targets set for creating a 'single market and production base' in the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint of 2007, signed by the Heads of the Governments of the ASEAN countries. The focus of the report is on policy and market integration outcomes achieved in ASEAN Member States (AMS) as part of the Pillar One of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) formation process. The aim is to assess progress drawing on evidence from a large range of indicators on policies and outcomes. The report then suggests priorities for future actions for implementing the AEC 2015 goals. This report is based on the inception report presented to and endorsed by the Senior Economic Officials' Meetings of the ASEAN last year and on the presentation on early findings also to the SEOM. The earlier version of this report was also presented to the 45th ASEAN Economic Ministers' Meetings in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam in August 2013. This report is intended to complement the recent mid-term review report by the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA, 2012), which has focused more on progress with agreements and commitments for achieving AEC 2015 goals.Publication World Trade Indicators 2008 : Benchmarking Policy and Performance(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008)The World Trade Indicators (WTI) database and ranking tool cover country level indicators of trade performance and policies and institutions that affect trade. The purpose of this initiative by the World Bank is to benchmark progress in these areas while highlighting important data gaps. The value of timely, good-quality data for policy making and effective international negotiations cannot be underestimated. Such data are also needed for reducing transactions costs for businesses. This publication summarizes patterns in world trade policy and trade outcomes revealed by the WTI database, focusing mainly on regional and income level variations and providing the context to help evaluate individual country progress. It is hoped that this initiative, by benchmarking country performance in various policy and outcome areas, will enhance the ability of policy makers to design and implement needed trade-related reforms. It is also hoped that countries will be further encouraged to produce better and more up to date data and make it publicly available, both domestically and in international databases, in a timely manner.Publication Trade Policy Reform in the East Asian Transition Economies(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-01)The performance of the East Asian transition economies in export and income growth has been strikingly better than that of countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The East Asian economies have achieved remarkably high growth rates in outputs and exports without the often large declines in output and exports observed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. East Asian reformers have successfully made many of the parallel changes needed in both domestic and trade policies to secure export and income growth. (It makes no sense, for example, to introduce the trade policy instruments of a market economy when the domestic economy is still based on central planning.) But there has been no single magic formula for their success. The author discusses what each of the economies (Cambodia, China, Lao People's Democratic Republic, and Vietnam) has done. China experienced an extended transition process; the transition ws much shorter in other East Asian transition economies--especially Cambodia. Several of the East Asian transition economies used accession to a regional arrangement as part of their reform strategy. China focused mainly on unilateral reforms and, more recently, reforms associated with its accession to the World Trade Organization. Most have made extensive use of policies to attract foreign investment and to mitigate the burden of protection on manufacturing exporters. Most of the remaining trade policy problems, although difficult, appear to be problems more of development than of transition.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Is US Trade Policy Reshaping Global Supply Chains ?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-11-01)This paper examines the reshaping of supply chains using detailed US 10-digit import data (tariff-line level) between 2017 and 2022. The results show that while US-China decoupling in bilateral trade is real, supply chains remain intertwined with China. Over the period, China’s share of US imports fell from 22 to 16 percent. The paper shows that the decline is due to US tariffs. US imports from China are being replaced with imports from large developing countries with revealed comparative advantage in a product. Countries replacing China tend to be deeply integrated into China’s supply chains and are experiencing faster import growth from China, especially in strategic industries. Put differently, to displace China on the export side, countries must embrace China’s supply chains. Within products, the reorientation of trade is consistent with a “China + 1” strategy, as opposed to diversified sourcing across multiple countries. There is some evidence of nearshoring, but it is exclusive to border nations, and there is no consistent evidence of reshoring. Despite the significant reshaping, China remained the top supplier of imported goods to the US in 2022.Publication Global Economic Prospects, June 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-11)After several years of negative shocks, global growth is expected to hold steady in 2024 and then edge up in the next couple of years, in part aided by cautious monetary policy easing as inflation gradually declines. However, economic prospects are envisaged to remain tepid, especially in the most vulnerable countries. Risks to the outlook, while more balanced, are still tilted to the downside, including the possibility of escalating geopolitical tensions, further trade fragmentation, and higher-for-longer interest rates. Natural disasters related to climate change could also hinder activity. Subdued growth prospects across many emerging market and developing economies and continued risks underscore the need for decisive policy action at the global and national levels. Global Economic Prospects is a World Bank Group Flagship Report that examines global economic developments and prospects, with a special focus on emerging market and developing economies, on a semiannual basis (in January and June). Each edition includes analytical pieces on topical policy challenges faced by these economies.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.