| Title | Explaining Africa's (Dis)advantage |
| Authors | Harrison, Ann E. Lin, Justin Yifu Xu, Lixin Colin |
| Affiliation | Univ Penn, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA. NBER, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA. Peking Univ, Beijing, Peoples R China. World Bank, Washington, DC USA. |
| Keywords | Africa business environment finance infrastructure party monopoly DEVELOPING-COUNTRIES FOREIGN-INVESTMENT LABOR REGULATION PROPERTY-RIGHTS CHINESE FIRMS GROWTH INSTITUTIONS PERFORMANCE OWNERSHIP CLIMATE |
| Issue Date | 2014 |
| Publisher | world development |
| Citation | WORLD DEVELOPMENT.2014,63,(,SI),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. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. |
| URI | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11897/406161 |
| ISSN | 0305-750X |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.worlddev.2013.10.011 |
| Indexed | SSCI |
| Appears in Collections: | 待认领 |
