Blog
Science and Survival: Is an Agriculture-led Developmental Model the Way Forward for sub-Saharan Africa?
by
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen, Roger Williamson
May 2013
9 May 2013 Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen and Roger Williamson Pathways to Industrialization in the Twenty-First Century, (edited by Adam Szirmai, Wim...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (December 2011)
Tony Addison With the end of the year fast approaching, we bring you the last Angle of 2011. Here in Helsinki, the shortest day of the year is nearly...
Blog
Is Manufacturing Still the Main Engine of Growth in Developing Countries?
by
Adam Szirmai
May 2009
Adam Szirmai Since the late 18th century, the manufacturing sector has been the main engine of growth and catch up. Presently, however, service sector...
Journal Article
Industry Switching in Developing Countries
Firm turnover (i.e., firm entry and exit) is a well-recognized source of sector-level productivity growth. In contrast, the role and importance of firms that switch activities from one sector to another is not well understood. Firm switchers are...
Working Paper
The decline of the labour share in Mexico
This paper studies the decline of the labour share in Mexico during the period 1990–2015. It calculates the wage share and alternative measures of the labour income share (which includes labour income of the self-employed) for the whole economy, the...
Working Paper
Scoping Study on the Evolution of Industry in Ghana
This paper chronicles the evolution of industry in Ghana over the post-independence era from an inward over-protected import substitution industrialization strategy of 1960-83 to an outward liberalized strategy during 1984-2000, and since 2001, to...
Working Paper
Development as Diffusion
We consider economic development of sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of slow convergence of productivity, both across sectors and firms within sectors. Why have ‘productivity enclaves’, islands of high productivity in a sea of smaller low...
News
Three Myths About Industry in Africa
Read the article on key myths about industry in Africa written by John Page, Non-resident Fellow at UNU-WIDER in the Foresight Africa 2014 series issued by the Brookings Institution. Page co-leads with Finn Tarp the Learning to Compete (L2C): Industrial Development in Africa project.
Journal Article
Productivity Growth, Efficiency and Outsourcing in Manufacturing and Service Industries
This paper is a survey of recent contributions to, and developments of, the relationship between outsourcing, efficiency and productivity growth in manufacturing and services. The objective is to provide a thorough and up–to–date survey that provides...
Journal Article
On the relationship between innovation and performance
We examine sensitivity of the estimated relationship between innovation and firm performance. In doing so, we rely on a knowledge production function approach and carry out comparisons in a number of ways. The sensitivity analysis is based on the...
Journal Article
Innovation and performance in manufacturing industries
The availability of the new internationally harmonized innovation survey data collected from OECD countries has created some interesting opportunities for studying the following two key areas: (1) The determinants of innovation behavior at firm level...
Journal Article
Knowledge capital and performance heterogeneity
This paper is an empirical analysis of knowledge capital and performance heterogeneity at the firm level. We apply new econometric methods to extensive data on innovation and innovative activities in Swedish manufacturing. A number of interesting...
Journal Article
Export Spillovers
Part of Journal Special Issue
Learning to Compete
Blog
Made in Africa – the future of production on the continent
The international community has a new set of development goals. They reflect Africa’s aspirations much more closely than the Millennium Development...
Presentation
Apresentação dos resultados
Finn Tarp presented: INQUÉRITO AS INDÚSTRIAS MANUFACTUREIRAS 2012 (IIM 2012): APRESENTAÇÃO DOS RESULTADOS Mozambique’s Ministry for Planning and Development and in partnership with the Confederation of Economic Associations, Copenhagen University and...
Thu, 23 January 2014
Maputo,
Mozambique
Past event
Blog
Do the Awakening Giants Have Feet of Clay?
by
Pranab K. Bardhan
May 2010
It's imperative to demolish myths around the economic achievements of China and India and get a better sense of the real challenges. The author of the...
Blog
WIDER Annual Lecture 18: Managing Structural Transformation
by
Roger Williamson
December 2014
18 December 2014 Roger Williamson At the UN headquarters in New York on 18 November 2014, Peter Timmer, emeritus professor from Harvard, showed how...
Blog
Transforming Economic Structures in Africa – An Interview with Margaret McMillan
by
Roger Williamson
June 2014
25 June 2014In this interview Dr Margaret McMillan outlined the theory of structural transformation, which analyzes the underlying structure of the...
Blog
New Structural Economics – An Interview with Justin Lin
by
Roger Williamson
August 2014
27 August 2014 In this interview Justin Lin, Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER, talks about how the state can enable the process of...
Working Paper
The effects of Chinese import penetration on firm innovation
This paper evaluates the impact of Chinese import penetration on the innovation of Vietnamese manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2015, exploiting variations in import exposure by industry specialization and instrumenting for Chinese import penetration...
Working Paper
Dancing on the grid: electricity crises, manufacturing energy vulnerability, and jobs in South Africa
South Africa’s current electricity crises have worsened, placing the country on an uncertain and turbulent economic trajectory.To identify the manufacturing sub-sectors that are most vulnerable to this crises, we use the input–output matrices for the...
Journal Article
Structural change and poverty reduction in developing economies
This study presents an empirical framework that explores the relationship between poverty reduction and changes in the production structure of developing countries. We use the new GGDC-UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database to measure...
Journal Article
A manufacturing (re)naissance?
This study examines industrialization in developing countries. It introduces the GGDC-UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, which provides consistent annual data of employment, real and nominal value added by 12 sectors in 51 economies for the...
Blog
Sub-Saharan Africa had a manufacturing renaissance in 2010s – it’s a promising sign for the years ahead
by
Gaaitzen de Vries, Emmanuel Mensah, Hagen Kruse,
Kunal Sen
February 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the global economy, with world output contracting at 3.5% in 2020, and no recovery likely before the fourth...
Working Paper
Premature deindustrialization and income inequality in middle-income countries
This paper examines the income inequality implications of a ‘premature deindustrialization’ trend in middle-income countries. To identify the premature deindustrialization phase, we arrive at five conditions based on the trends in employment and...
Working Paper
The Determinants of Regional Manufactured Exports from a Developing Country
In this paper, the question of the location of exporters of manufactured goods within a country is investigated. Based on insights from new trade theory, the new economic geography (NEG) and gravity-equation modelling, an empirical model is specified...
Working Paper
Constraints on the performance and competitiveness of Tanzania’s manufacturing exports
This study sought to examine the main constraints to manufacturing export competitiveness in Tanzania. Using panel data for the period 1997–2018, the study established that supply-side factors dominate demand-side factors in explaining manufacturing...
Working Paper
Cash grants to manufacturers after Cyclone Idai
In March 2019, Cyclone Idai hit central Mozambique and caused widespread damage, including businesses in the enterprise sector. We use panel data and a randomized controlled trial to estimate the impact of unconditional cash grants on micro...
Report
Business Practice Intervention Survey
Myanmar’s manufacturing sector is at the heart of the country’s commercial landscape. From garment production for the international market to diverse food, furniture, gemstones, and metal provision, the more than 70,000 micro, small, and medium firms...
Working Paper
Industrialization in developing countries: is it related to poverty reduction?
This paper proposes an empirical framework that relates poverty reduction to production growth. We use the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database to measure the contribution to growth of productivity improvements within sectors and...
Working Paper
Informality and firm performance in Myanmar
Using a novel panel survey of enterprises in Myanmar, we compare the performance of manufacturing firms by three different informality definitions. The first is binary, based on whether firms pay taxes. The second captures five categories of...
Working Paper
Does aid to the productive sectors cause manufacturing sector growth in Africa?
In recent decades, Africa has received a large share of official development assistance compared to other regions of the world. Using AidData for 2000–13, this paper examines the effects of aid to productive sectors on manufacturing growth in Africa...
Blog
India’s manufacturing and services value-chains are shifting South: A curse or a blessing?
by
Karishma Banga
July 2021
Much has been written on India as an outlier in Global Value Chains (GVC). Despite being one of the largest and fastest-growing markets located in...