Explaining Africa’s (Dis)advantage

Ann Harrison, Justin Lin () and Lixin Xu

World Development, 2014, vol. 63, issue C, 59-77

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.

Keywords: Africa; business environment; finance; infrastructure; party monopoly (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X13002234
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Explaining Africa's (Dis)advantage (2013)
Working Paper: Explaining Africa's (Dis)advantage (2013)
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:eee:wdevel:v:63:y:2014:i:c:p:59-77

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2013.10.011

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().