 Firm Size, Employment and Value-added in African Manufacturing Firms: Why Ghana needs its 1 per centFrancis Teal No 2016-07, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Abstract: In this paper three censuses of manufacturing firms in Ghana for 1962, 1987 and 2003 are used to investigate changes in the firm size distribution and changes in the employment and value-added share across that distribution. It is shown that the censuses for 1987 and 2003 excluded self-employed enterprises with employees which were a rapidly growing part of the industrial structure over the period 1987 to 2003. Using a wider definition of firm, which includes those enterprises, there has been a substantial shift in employment to small firms where productivity is low. Using the wider definition of a firm in 2003 the top 1 per cent of firms produced 63 per cent of value-added. If the narrow definition of firm used in the manufacturing census is applied than the top 1 per cent of firms in 2003 were producing 72 per cent of value-added. These findings are related to the view there is a ‘missing-middle’ in the firm size distribution in Africa. Keywords: African manufacturing firms; missing-middle; census data (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2016-07 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC. |
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