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Author: Howard Pack
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Access and Equity in Basic Education
Languages : en
Pages : 26
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Book Description
Continued efforts to develop high-level industrial skills in Sub-Saharan African countries may be wasteful without a more competitive environment in the industrial sector. But lack of such skills may limit the benefits to the industrial sector from future liberalization. As a result, the supply response to improved incentives may be weak.
Author: Howard Pack
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Access and Equity in Basic Education
Languages : en
Pages : 26
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Book Description
Continued efforts to develop high-level industrial skills in Sub-Saharan African countries may be wasteful without a more competitive environment in the industrial sector. But lack of such skills may limit the benefits to the industrial sector from future liberalization. As a result, the supply response to improved incentives may be weak.
Author: Howard Pack
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 20
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Book Description
Continued efforts to develop high-level industrial skills in Sub-Saharan African countries may be wasteful without a more competitive environment in the industrial sector. But lack of such skills may limit the benefits to the industrial sector from future liberalization. As a result, the supply response to improved incentives may be weak.Total factor productivity has been low in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. It is often said that the binding constraint on African industrial development is the inadequate supply of technologically capable workers. And many cross-country studies imply that the low level of human capital in Africa is an important source of low growth in per capita income.The results of Pack and Paxson's study do not necessarily conflict with this view. They indicate that in noncompetitive industrial sectors with little inflow of new technology, the contribution of technological abilities, however it is measured, is limited.If liberalization of the economy generated greater competition, or if export growth were accelerated - permitting the import of inputs embodying new technology - local skills could contribute significantly more in raising output.The experience of other countries also suggests that as the economy opens to flows of international knowledge - whether through technology transfers or through informal transfers from purchasers of exports - the technological capacity of local industry becomes important.The policy implications of this analysis are clear: Without the prospect of a more competitive environment, continued efforts to develop high-level industrial skills may be wasteful. But the absence of such skills may limit the benefits to the industrial sector from future liberalization, as a result of which the supply response to improved incentives may be weak.This paper - a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to analyze the effect of public policies on industrial productivity. The authors may be contacted at
[email protected] or
[email protected].
Author: Richard S. Newfarmer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198821883
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
A study prepared by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER)
Author: Hinh T. Dinh
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821389610
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
This book examines how light manufacturing can offer a viable solution for Sub-Saharan Africa's need for structural transformation and productive job creation, given its potential competitiveness based on low wage costs and an abundance of natural resources that supply raw materials needed for industries. Based on five different analytical tools and data sources, the book examines in detail the binding constraints in each of the subsectors relevant for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): apparel, leather goods, metal products, agribusiness, and wood products. Ethiopia is used as an example, with Vietnam as a comparator and China as a benchmark, and with insights from Tanzania and Zambia used to draw out lessons more broadly for SSA. The book recommends a program of focused policies to exploit Africa's latent comparative advantage in a particular group of light manufacturing industries - especially leather goods, garments, and agricultural processing. These industries hold the prospect of initiating rapid, substantial, and potentially self-propelling waves of rising output, employment, productivity, and exports that can push countries like Ethiopia on a path of structural change of the sort recently achieved in both China and Vietnam. The timing for these initiatives is very appropriate as China's comparative advantage in these areas is diminishing due to steep cost increases associated with rising wages and non-wage labor costs, escalating land prices, and mounting regulatory costs. Five features of this book distinguish it from previous studies. First, the detailed work on light manufacturing at the subsector and product levels in five countries provide in-depth cost comparisons between Asia and Africa that can be used as a framework for future studies. Second, the book uses a wide array of quantitative and qualitative techniques to identify key constraints to enterprises and to evaluate firm performance differences across countries. Third, the findings that firm constraints vary by country, sector, and firm size led to a focused approach to identifying constraints and combining market-based measures and select government intervention to remove them. Fourth, the solution to light manufacturing problems cuts across many sectors: solving the manufacturing inputs problem requires solving specific issues in agriculture, education, and infrastructure. African countries cannot afford to wait until all the problems across sectors are resolved. Fifth, the book draws on experiences and solutions from other developing countries to inform its recommendations. This book will be very valuable to African policy makers, professional economists, and anyone interested in the economic development, industrialization, and structural transformation of developing countries.
Author: Abiodun Egbetokun
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429892497
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
The literature on innovation in Africa is rapidly expanding, and a recurring thread in the emergent literature is the pervasiveness of systemic weaknesses that inhibit the innovation process. Despite these, firms are able to innovate in Africa. It is then logical to ask: how do African firms manage to overcome the prevalent constraints and learn to innovate? This book directly tackles this question, with a view to improving our understanding of the innovation landscape in Africa. The book brings together some of the latest innovation research from across the African continent, ranging from Tanzania and Ethiopia in the east to Nigeria in the west. The chapters included in the collection adopt different but complementary theoretical and methodological approaches to address a rich mix of interrelated issues. These issues include the factors that enhance or inhibit innovation in African firms, the sources of (knowledge/information for) innovation, policy options for overcoming constraints and facilitating firm-level innovation, the nature and roles of brokers and intermediaries in dealing with innovation constraints and in facilitating the innovation process and the role of interactive learning and acquisition of embodied technology in the innovation process. This book was originally published as a special issue of Innovation and Development.
Author: Ata Mazaheri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134425716
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
The book provides a useful source of greater understanding of African manufacturing firms and the perplexing lack of widespread industrial growth during the post-colonial decades.
Author: Diao, Xinshen
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 85
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Book Description
Recent growth accelerations in Africa are characterized by increasing productivity in agriculture, a declining share of the labor force employed in agriculture and declining productivity in modern sectors such as manufacturing. To shed light on this puzzle, we disaggregate firms in the manufacturing sector by size using two newly created panels of manufacturing firms, one for Tanzania covering 2008-2016 and one for Ethiopia covering 1996-2017. Our analysis reveals a dichotomy between larger firms that exhibit superior productivity performance but do not expand employment much, and small firms that absorb employment but do not experience any productivity growth. We suggest the poor employment performance of large firms is related to use of capital-intensive techniques associated with global trends in technology.
Author: Yutaka Yoshino
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821386279
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
The World Bank, in collaboration with others, recently conducted a study on Africa's domestic enterprises to improve the understanding of the constraints micro and small enterprises in Africa face in improving productivity and expanding their markets. In Africa, there are stark performance gaps between domestically owned enterprises and foreign-owned enterprises in terms of sales performance, productivity, and ability to reach distant markets. Among others, size appears to be a dominant factor in explaining the gap. Against this background, the study analyzes how naturally formed industrial clusters - concentrations of enterprises engaged in same or closely related industrial activities in specific locations - could potentially mitigate constraints Africa's micro and small enterprises face and enhance their business performance. The study is one of the first comprehensive quantitative inquiries on industrial clusters in Africa.
Author: Daniel Nordmann
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656205515
Category : Political Science
Languages : de
Pages : 37
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Book Description
Essay aus dem Jahr 2007 im Fachbereich Politik - Internationale Politik - Region: Afrika, University of Cape Town, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa is practically absent from the manufactured export scene and the "dynamics of export growth and its technological upgrading are completely bypassing the region" (Lall/Pietrobelli 2002: 25). While the East Asian emerging markets and recently China have been successful in the diversification of exports over the past decades, African(1) economies still remain almost totally dependent on their traditional export products. Their share of global manufactured exports is almost zero. Therefore it is "clear that Africa has suffered a chronic failure of economic growth [and export diversification]. The problem for analysis is to determine its causes." (Collier/ Gunning 1999: 3-4) While some authors, as Wood and Mayer (2001), and Karshenas (2001), emphasize structural constraints limiting the process of structural transformation and export diversification - known as the resource-based thesis - other economists as Collier/Gunning (1999a), World Bank (2000), Lall/Pietrobelli (2002), Rodrik (1999) and Soludo (1998) explain Africa's low share of manufactured exports and the lack of industrialization mainly as policy-induced. [...] 1 The terms "Africa" and "Sub-Saharan Africa" (henceforth SSA) refer in this paper to the Sub-Saharan African countries except South Africa.
Author: Deon Filmer
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 146480107X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
"The series is sponsored by the Agence Francaise de Developpement and the World Bank."
