African Development Review-Revue Africaine De Developpement最新文献

Agriculture is a very important sector in Africa's economic development, particularly in Burkina Faso, as it employs a large proportion of the population. Given the importance of labor in this sector, a good allocation of the different types of labor could help increase agricultural productivity in Burkina Faso. This research contributes to the literature by determining the specific contributions of each type of labor in enhancing cotton productivity. The sample of this research is 477 cotton farms, and a semiparametric stochastic frontier model has been used in the analysis. The results show that the proportion of wage labor has a nonlinear effect and contributes to improving cotton productivity when the number of educated people in the household increases. But family labor decreases cotton productivity when the number of educated people in the household increase. The comparison between the findings of the semiparametric and parametric frontier shows that technical efficiency is 72.44% when education is used as the channel through which production factors affect cotton productivity. However, this technical efficiency is 54.96% when production factors directly affect cotton productivity in the parametric frontier model. Promoting education in rural areas will help to increase the number of people educated and consequently improve cotton productivity.

The paper aims to investigate the legitimacy of the African Union by examining the socio-demographic determinants of citizens' support of African integration. To do this, we use Rounds 4, 5, 6, and 8 of the Afrobarometer survey data corresponding to more than 110,000 respondents. Using logistics regressions, we find that individual characteristics such as living area, education, employment status, political membership, freedom, living conditions, and Living Poverty Index (LPI) are significantly related to the probability of supporting African integration. The findings are largely robust to dynamics of regional integration, the African Union, and Regional Economic Communities (RECs). Thus, since African citizens' trust in the unification could be considered a condition of legitimacy in the process, our results suggest that more efforts should be made to gain credibility, especially as it pertains to the benefits of African integration.

This paper investigates the effects of institutional quality on tax revenue collection in sub-Saharan African countries. We include the six institutional quality indicators (i.e., voice and accountability, political stability, regulatory quality, rule of law, control of corruption, and government effectiveness) as explanatory factors for tax revenues and its components in a sample of 42 countries over the period 1996–2019. A system GMM approach was used for the estimations. Consistent with previous results, we find that institutional quality has positive and significant effects on tax revenue collection in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, aggregate total tax revenues, direct taxes, income taxes, and goods and services taxes are positively affected by the six institutional quality indicators. Indirect taxes are positively associated with four indicators, with the exception of government effectiveness and political stability, while tax on international trade are affected by institutional quality factors, with the exception of control of corruption and voice and accountability. These findings indicate that sub-Saharan African countries should improve institutional quality to boost tax revenue collection.

This paper explores the influence of corporate governance on the profitability and credit risk of a sample of listed banks in Tunisia. The methodology involves two main steps. Firstly, principal component analysis is employed to construct a novel governance index, assessing the quality of both internal and external bank governance. This index takes into account the degree of compliance and application of directives and laws mandated by the Tunisian Central Bank regarding banking governance. In the second step, panel data analysis is conducted to scrutinize the impact of internal and external governance mechanisms on the profitability and risk of Tunisian banks. The results reveal that as the governance index increases, the profitability of banks improves in terms of return on assets and stock market performance. Additionally, a higher governance index is correlated with a reduction in credit risks, as indicated by lower instances of non-performing loans and an increased rate of coverage for classified debts. To enhance the robustness of our results, we calculate a standard governance score based on existing empirical literature. Furthermore, to account for potential endogeneity, we employ the two-step system generalized method of moments.

This paper examines the asymmetric link between carbon pricing and the comparative advantage in environmental goods exports in South Africa from 1995 to 2021. The non-linear autoregressive distributed lag model is utilized to investigate the effects of both minor and major positive and negative fluctuations in carbon taxes, technological innovation, and energy transition on comparative advantage. The results reveal that carbon taxes have an asymmetric effect on comparative advantage in both the short and long runs, with positive shocks exerting a greater beneficial influence than negative shocks. Specifically, it is found that a 1% reduction in carbon taxes corresponds to a 1.24% decline in the response variable, whereas a 1% increase in carbon taxes is associated with a 2.72% increase in comparative advantage in environmental goods exports, which is twice as large. The study also uncovers evidence of an asymmetric relationship between low-carbon technological innovation and comparative advantage in environmental goods exports. However, strong evidence of a long-run asymmetric linkage between the energy transition and comparative advantage is not established. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that a positive shift in energy transition is linked with a 0.32% rise in comparative advantage in environmental goods exports, whereas a negative shift in energy transition corresponds to a 0.11% decrease. The practical policy implications are also discussed.

Illicit financial flows have been an issue of great concern over the past decades due to the challenge they present for economic development in Africa. Illicit financial flows undermine the productivity and growth of African economies as countries lose foreign exchange and tax revenues. Countries lose financial resources needed for development programs, hence undermining social service delivery and retarding poverty reduction. To effectively combat illicit financial flows, it is imperative to examine their determinants. This study seeks to examine the determinants of illicit capital movement in the China-Africa trade through the mechanisms of trade misinvoicing over the period 1990–2019. The IMF's Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) database is used to estimate trade misinvoicing. Estimates using mirror trade data indicate that both exports of Africa to China and imports from China to Africa are mainly underinvoiced. The net effect shows that trade misinvoicing in the China-Africa trade results in net illicit capital outflow for about 44% of countries in Africa. The results from panel data regressions indicate that tax evasion is one of the major factors behind misinvoicing in China-Africa trade. In addition, corruption control is found to reduce export underinvoicing, while political stability reduces both export overinvoicing and import overinvoicing. Export misinvoicing increases with the presence of natural resources in the exporting country. Other factors associated with trade misinvoicing in China-Africa trade include openness to trade, current account deficit, and real exchange rate. The study suggests ways to reduce trade misinvoicing in China-Africa trade.

Addressing the challenge of limited access to drinking water requires a comprehensive understanding of its underlying causes. This study aims to evaluate the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on access to basic services in Africa, focusing specifically on people's access to drinking water. Utilizing data from a panel of 51 countries spanning the period 2000–2020, we employed a two-step system generalized method of moments to estimate dynamic econometric models. Our analysis reveals a positive correlation between FDI inflows and improved access to drinking water. A one-percentage point increase in FDI inflows leads to a 0.026 percentage point rise in the proportion of people with access to drinking water. Notably, the effects vary between urban and rural areas, with marginal effects of 0.022 and 0.160, respectively. Furthermore, our findings indicate an inverse U-shaped relationship between FDI and access to drinking water in Africa, signifying that while access to drinking water improves with increasing FDI, the rate of improvement diminishes. The study recommends the judicious utilization of tax revenues from multinational enterprises to fund basic service infrastructures and advocates for measures aimed at attracting additional FDIs.

With the increasing education of women in developing countries, educational assortative mating has become a significant aspect in the marriage market, with educational assortative mating patterns likely to be dependent on marriage timing. Using pooled data from three recent waves of the Cameroon Demographic and Health Surveys, the paper investigates the effect of marriage timing on educational assortative mating patterns in Cameroon. To achieve the objective, the study employed the Cox proportional hazard model and a control function version of multinomial Probit. Results show that delaying marriage is expected to decrease the likelihood of women engaging in low educationally homogamous marriages while increasing the probability of women entering high educationally homogamous and hypogamous marriages. Findings further depicted that over the period 2004–2018, the likelihood of women engaging in low educationally homogamous marriages decreased meanwhile the likelihood of women considering high educationally homogamous marriages and hypogamous marriages increased. The implications of these findings are in tandem with the wisdom that, programs encouraging the girl child to delay early marriages and stay longer in school can help women engage in high educationally homogamous marriages, empower women and thus improves their socioeconomic status.