Competition, Competitiveness and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Reda Cherif, Sandesh Dhungana, Xiangming Fang, Jesus Gonzalez-Garcia, Yuanchen Yang, Mustafa Yenice and Jung Eun Yoon

No 2020/030, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Does greater product market competition improve external competitiveness and growth? This paper examines this question by using country-and firm-level data for a sample of 39 sub-Saharan African countries over 2000–17, as well as other emerging market economies and developing countries, and finds that an improvement in domestic competition is associated with a signficant increase in real GDP per capita growth rate, achieved mainly through an improvement in export competitiveness and productivity growth. Price levels, including of essential items, are also generally lowered with an increase in competition. Moreover, at the firm-level, evidence shows that greater competition—proxied through a decline in corporate market power—is associated with an increase in firm’s investment and the labor’s share in output. These effects are more pronounced in the manufacturing sector and among domestic firms compared to foreign firms.

Keywords: WP; competition indicator; firm profitability; firm markup; cost minimization problem; firm Dynamics; firm-level indicators; enterprise data; Competition; Emerging and frontier financial markets; Commodity markets; Productivity; Labor share; Sub-Saharan Africa; Global; Africa; Markups; Market Power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48
Date: 2020-02-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-com, nep-eff and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=49019 (application/pdf)

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:imf:imfwpa:2020/030

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().