Institutions and Job Growth in African Manufacturing: Does Employment Protection Regulation Matter?

Louise Fox and Ana Maria Oviedo

Journal of African Economies, 2013, vol. 22, issue 4, 616-650

Abstract: We use firm-level survey data from the manufacturing sector in 20 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries and Doing Business (DB) country indicators to explore the links between employment protection regulation (EPR) and firm job growth during the period 2003–07. We find that EPR is uncorrelated with job growth in the short run. In the long run, however, overall regulations as measured by DB scores are significantly adversely associated with job growth, while the evidence for a negative effect of EPR seems rather weak. Thus labour regulation reform might not lead to high employment payoffs in SSA; improving the overall investment climate should be the more immediate focus. Copyright 2013 , Oxford University Press.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejt017 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:22:y:2013:i:4:p:616-650

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().