African Development Review-Revue Africaine De Developpement最新文献

A growing body of literature highlights the importance of export sophistication for economic development. Given the newness of the literature on export sophistication, its determinants are under-exploited. As a pioneer study, this paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining the effect of infrastructure development on export sophistication. Based on a panel of 45 African countries over the period 2003–2016, the results of the different estimations show that infrastructure, including transport, electricity, ICT and access to water and sanitation, improves export sophistication in Africa. Our results also show that the effect of infrastructure varies at different intervals of the export sophistication distribution. Therefore, improved infrastructure would allow African countries to not only improve their export structure but also achieve sustainable and durable growth.

This paper highlights the existence of a nonlinear relationship between bank stability and competition and analyzes the role that government intervention plays in shaping this relationship. We used a sample of 45 banks in North African countries over the period 2005–2019. We applied a semiparametric approach based on penalized spline estimation. The results unveil the specific shape of the competition–stability relationship at different levels of competition; banks reconsider their risk-taking behavior at each level of competition. This nonmonotonic stability at different levels of competition is attributed to the quality of intervention, which is found to be an important determinant in shaping this relationship. Thus, we explain the dispersion of risk levels among North African banks in part by the quality of regulation in each country and conclude by recommending the strengthening of regulation, supervision and the macro-prudential framework.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the impact of the informal economy on bilateral exports in sub-Saharan African countries. We use a gravity model, to which we add indicators of the informal economy and indicator variables for different economic regions. The study used Pseudo-Poisson Maximum Likelihood (PPML) and Heckman estimation techniques on data from the period 2002–2018. The results show that the informal economy has a negative impact on bilateral inter-community exports and a positive impact on bilateral intra-community exports. These results thus support the idea that the informal economy can accelerate the integration of regional economic communities and ultimately facilitate the establishment of bilateral export free trade areas at the continental level.

Unequal asset rights remain an important driver of gender inequality and food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using cross-sectional data from 31 SSA countries, this study examines the effect of gender inequality in asset ownership on women's food security in the region. The seemingly unrelated (SUR) bivariate probit framework has been adopted in analysing the data. This approach is used for addressing the possible endogeneity bias that occurs when the dependent variable and regressor are both endogenous and binary. The major finding of this study reveals that gender inequality in asset ownership increases women's risk of facing food insecurity. The aforementioned is more pronounced for women who are undereducated, live in rural areas, and suffer various forms of discrimination. It is therefore important that more egalitarian laws on asset ownership and inheritance be adopted in all SSA countries. This will significantly increase women's specific food security and thus contribute to improving inclusiveness in these countries.

This paper examines, in depth, the hypotheses explaining the tax effort of seven West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) countries over the period 1996–2018. The studies of Karakaplan and Kutlu were applied to the stochastic tax frontier model. This provides a new method for analyzing tax effort that solves potential endogeneity problems, especially those of income. This study confirms the positive impact of income, trade openness, urbanization, government capital spending and anticorruption on tax revenue mobilization, while the size of the agricultural sector has a negative impact on tax revenue. On the other hand, reforms of tax institutions have no effect on tax effort. The average tax revenue of the countries of the WAEMU is 11.34 and the average tax effort is estimated at 0.7901 over the period 1996–2018. Thus, these countries could achieve a tax revenue to GDP ratio of 13.72% if they fully exploit their potential.

This paper analyzes the effects of climatic variables on food crop yields at the prefectural level from 1996 to 2016 in Togo. Using the panel-corrected standard errors method and panel data from departments in charge of agricultural statistics and meteorology, the results show that meteorological variables have various effects on food crops yields, but the negative effects are dominant. In addition, adaptation strategies through agricultural land reallocation have not enabled farmers to improve food crops yields. There is an urgent need for public authorities to implement actions to strengthen farmers’ resilience through practice adoption and cultural innovations for adaptation to climate change.