Explaining Africa’s (Dis)advantage : The Curse of Party Monopoly

Harrison, Ann E. ; Lin, Justin Yifu ; Xu, L. Colin

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    ADVERSE EFFECT;    ADVERSE EFFECTS;    AGENCY PROBLEMS;    AUTOMOBILE;   

RP-ID  :  WPS6316

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Africa's economic performance hasbeen widely viewed with pessimism. This paper usesfirm-level data for 89 countries to examine formal firmperformance. Without controls, manufacturing African firmsdo not perform much worse than firms in other regions. Butthey do have structural problems, exhibiting much lowerexport intensity and investment rates. Once the analysiscontrols for geography and the political and businessenvironment, formal African firms robustly lead in salesgrowth, total factor productivity levels and productivitygrowth. Africa's conditional advantage is higher inlow-tech than in high-tech manufacturing, and exists inmanufacturing but not in services. While geography,infrastructure, and access to finance play an important rolein explaining Africa's disadvantage in firmperformance, the key factor is party monopoly. The longer asingle political party remains in power, the lower are firmproductivity levels, growth rates, and sales growth formanufacturing. In contrast, the business environment andfirm characteristics (except for foreign investment) do notmatter as much. The paper also finds evidence that theeffects of the political and business environment areheterogeneous across sectors and firms of various levels of technology.