Publication: Explaining Africa's (Dis)advantage
Date
2013-01
ISSN
Published
2013-01
Author(s)
Abstract
Africa's economic performance has
been widely viewed with pessimism. In this paper, firm-level
data for around 80 countries are used to examine formal firm
performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms
perform significantly worse than firms in other regions.
They have lower productivity levels and growth rates, export
less, and have lower investment rates. Once geography,
political competition and the business environment are
controlled for, formal African firms lead in productivity
levels and growth. Africa's conditional advantage is
higher in low-tech than in high-tech manufacturing, and
exists in manufacturing but not in services. The key factors
explaining Africa's disadvantage at the firm level are
lack of infrastructure, access to finance, and political competition.
Citation
“Harrison, Ann E.; Lin, Justin Yifu; Xu, L. Colin. 2013. Explaining Africa's (Dis)advantage. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 6316. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/5c1710d7-5c81-51e9-b7d3-2e5859f6367c License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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