This paper studies the demographic consequences of the Rwandan genocide and how the excess mortality due to the conflict was distributed in the population. Data collected by the 2000 Demographic and Health Survey indicate that although there were more deaths across the entire population, adult males were the most likely to die. Using the characteristics of the survey respondent as a proxy for the socio-economic status of the victims’ family, the results also show that individuals with an urban or more educated background were more likely to die. The country's loss of human capital is a long-term cost of the genocide that compounds the human tragedies.

Many net oil-importing developing countries, particularly African economies, have faced economic difficulties with high oil price increases. As a case study, this paper assesses the distributional effects of a rise in various petroleum product prices in Mali using a standard computable general equilibrium model. The results suggest that rising diesel prices primarily affect richer households, while the poorest ones tend to suffer more from higher kerosene and gasoline prices. Overall, the impact of fuel prices on household budgets shows a U-shaped relationship with expenditure per capita. Regardless of the oil product considered, high-income households benefit disproportionately from oil price subsidies. This suggests that petroleum price subsidies are ineffective in protecting the income of poor households compared with a targeted subsidy.

The effect of nominal tariff cuts on industry wage differentials has been the subject of a number of recent empirical studies. In this paper we investigate the latter relationship with respect to the South African trade reform experience using micro-level labour data for the period from 1995 to 2004. Our study extends on the existing literature in two respects: first, we are the first controlling for the potential effect of labour market institutions, such as collective bargaining power, in assessing the relationship between tariffs and industry wages. Second, we account for general equilibrium effects by controlling for the impact of changes in effective tariff rates. On the one hand, we find that only wages in industries with levels of unionisation beyond a certain threshold were adversely affected by tariff cuts. This negative effect is exacerbated by the extent of sectoral union power. The reported large magnitudes of the tariff impact on wages is in line with the considerably high mark-ups documented for South Africa. On the other hand we find some evidence suggesting that wages in industries with union power below the threshold were positively affected by the tariff cuts. This evidence suggests the omitted variable bias resulting from not controlling for industry heterogeneities in bargaining power when examining the wage–trade relationship.

This paper is the first to estimate job satisfaction equations in post-Apartheid South Africa. Absolute earnings contribute to greater job satisfaction. Racial group is also an important predictor of job satisfaction, but, when interacted with a proxy for affirmative action legislation, it is found that black job satisfaction is positively correlated with this legislation whereas coloured and to a lesser extent white job satisfaction is diminished.

Has Africa finally reached the path to sustained growth? We find that much of the improvement in economic performance in Africa after 1995 is attributable to a substantial reduction in the frequency and severity of growth declines in all economies and an increase in growth accelerations in mineral-rich economies. We find, however, that growth accelerations have not been generally accompanied by improvements in variables often correlated with long run growth, such as investment. We also fail to find evidence that substantial policy and governance improvements were associated with the post-1995 accelerations. We conclude that Africa's growth recovery remains fragile.

Have recent reforms improved market functioning in African economies? This article examines how the raw milk market in western and central Kenya has developed after the dairy sector liberalisation in 1992 by using panel data of 862 rural households. From the late 1990s to 2004, the proportion of rural households who sold milk increased from 37 to 51%. During the same period, the proportion of households who sold milk to traders more than doubled, while it declined from 29 to 12% for those who sold milk to dairy cooperatives. On the basis of the price differentials between the farm gate and retail prices, we find that the functioning of the market improved between the late 1990s and 2004; in turn, the development of the milk market has increased the adoption of improved cows, resulting in higher milk sales.

There is a large literature on the impact of exchange rate and monetary policy regimes on inflation volatility in emerging markets. Other determinants of inflation volatility are less well understood. Using monthly time-series data on the prices of ninety-six individual products in thirty-seven Nigerian states, I explore the non-monetary state-specific characteristics that drive local inflation volatility. Among the significant determinants of volatility are average inflation, transport and communication infrastructure, consumer access to credit markets and urbanisation. However, there is substantial heterogeneity across products in the relative importance of these factors. We discuss the implications of our results for development policy.

Using data from labour force surveys conducted simultaneously in the capital cities of seven West African Economic and Monetary Union countries, we estimate a model of residential location choice in which expected earnings play a role. The model is first estimated in a reduced form. Estimates are then used to correct for the endogeneity of locational choice in the earnings equations estimated for each country. We find that migration behaviour has a significant effect in shaping earnings differentials between education levels and between the seven capital cities. Corrected predicted earnings in each country are then used as an independent variable in a structural multinomial logit of residential choice. Results show that individuals tend to reside in countries in which their expected earnings are higher than elsewhere.

The Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CAEMC) has been a monetary union for several decades now. According to the hypothesis of endogenous optimal currency areas (OCAs), the degree of business cycle synchronisation across its member states should be significantly higher today than forty years ago. This paper examines cycle synchronisation along three different statistical dimensions and shows that (i) synchronisation has remained low throughout the period 1960–2007, but (ii) it has marginally increased over time. These findings have important implications for the design of the economic integration process in Africa. A chronology of business cycles in CAEMC countries is provided.

What are the root causes of Africa's current state of under-development? Is it the long history of slave trade, the legacy of extractive colonial institutions, or the fallout of malaria? We investigate the relative contributions of these factors using Atlantic distance, Indian Ocean distance, Saharan distance, Red Sea distance, log settler mortality and malaria ecology as instruments. The results show that malaria matters the most and all other factors are statistically insignificant. Malaria also negatively affects savings. The results are robust even when the malaria ecology instrument is replaced by frost, humidity and rainfall and when the latter are used as additional control variables. We find that frost alone is enough to knock off the effects of slave trade and institutions on long-term development in Africa.

Using matched employer–employee data from eleven African countries, we investigate if there is job sorting in African labour markets. We find that much of the wage gap associated with education is driven by selection across occupations and firms. This is consistent with educated workers being more effective at complex tasks such as labour management. In all countries, the education wage gap widens rapidly at high levels of education. Most of the education wage gap at low levels of education can be explained by selection across occupations. We also find that the education wage gap tends to be higher for women, except in Morocco where many poorly educated women work in the garment sector. A large share of the gender wage gap is explained by selection into low wage occupations and firms.

We test the hypothesis that product standards harmonised to de facto international standards are less trade restrictive than ones that are not. To do this, we construct a new database of European Union (EU) product standards. We identify standards that are aligned with International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standards (as a proxy for de facto international norms). We use a sample-selection gravity model to examine the impact of EU standards on African textiles and clothing exports, a sector of particular development interest. We find robust evidence that non-harmonised standards reduce African exports of these products. EU standards which are harmonised to ISO standards are less trade restricting. Our results suggest that efforts to promote African exports of manufactures may need to be complemented by measures to reduce the cost impacts of product standards, including international harmonisation. In addition, efforts to harmonise national standards with international norms, including those through the World Trade Organisation Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement, promise concrete benefits through trade expansion.

China's export expansion is commonly associated with lower global manufacturing prices. For most countries, lower prices heighten global competition but also allow importing a cheaper and wider set of inputs and consumer goods. This paper investigates the balance of these two forces in Kenya, Mauritius and the Southern Africa Customs Union, the largest exporters of manufactured goods in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper uses the economic geography model of Redding and Venables (in Economic geography and international inequality, Journal of International Economics, 62, 53-22, 2004) to decompose the import growth of a large number of countries into supply and demand capacities. This decomposition allows for analysis of the extent to which China's export growth has altered manufacturing import and export prices for the selected countries. The study finds that China has significantly decreased world prices in major markets for manufactures, especially textiles, wearing apparel and footwear, potentially displacing the clothing exports of the selected African countries. As a consequence of China's export growth, these focus countries have also seen substantial reductions in their import prices across all manufacturing sectors. However, an estimation of their terms-of-trade suggests that the reductions in export prices outweigh the decrease in import prices and the countries are deemed to lose from China's manufactures export expansion.

This paper utilises an educational production function approach on post-apartheid data that include both schooling and community-level information, in order to empirically estimate the key determinants of Grade 12 pass rates in 2000. Quantile regression techniques are applied, allowing for more nuanced information. The key results are, firstly, that the pupil–teacher ratio is insignificant in explaining pass rates for schools below the 95th percentile of the school performance distribution. Secondly, the impact of resources on performance is not strong and, where there is a significant effect, it is highly dependent on the resource in question and the metric utilised for the dependent variable. Thirdly, knowledge infrastructure may be important to understand the absolute and relative performance of schools. Fourthly, proxy variables for teacher and parent characteristics are strongly significant, and the former should probably be a priority focus for any policy programme aimed at improving Grade 12 performance levels in South Africa.

Several empirical studies have found larger gender pay gaps at the upper tail of the wage distribution in developed countries, the so-called glass ceiling effect. In this paper, we investigate the relevance of the glass ceiling hypothesis in Morocco using a matched worker–firm data set of more than 8,000 employees and 850 employers working in the manufacturing sector. We estimate linear and quantile earnings regressions with controls for unobserved firm heterogeneity and perform a quantile decomposition. We also focus on the within-firm gender earnings gap using information on the firms' characteristics. Our results show that the gender earnings gap is higher at the top of the distribution than at the bottom. Furthermore, the gender gap widens in the upper tail of the earnings distribution when controlling for firm fixed effects.

In Djibouti the chewing of qat leaves is a widespread habit of the male population that has a profound socio-cultural importance, credited with fostering amity and building social relationships. This paper uses a sample of Djiboutian male adult household heads to test for the presence of peer effects in qat consumption choices in the context of the African society of Djibouti. We use multiple empirical strategies to assess the importance of peer effects in qat consumption. The results contribute to provide some suggestive evidence about the importance of social determinants in qat use.

Using 1985–2004 yearly panel data for 70 developing countries, including 28 from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the paper finds that once market size is accounted for, SSA's foreign direct investment (FDI) deficit with other regions of the world is mainly explained by the insufficient provision of public goods: relatively low human capital accumulation, in terms of education and health in SSA. On the basis of additional cross-sectional data, the paper finds that in the absence of HIV and malaria, net FDI inflows in the median SSA country could have been one-third higher during 2000–2004, with slightly more than one-half of this deficit explained by malaria.

This study used the Ricardian approach that captures farmer adaptations to varying environmental factors to analyze the impact of climate change on crop farming in Ethiopia. By collecting data from farm households in different agro-ecological zones of the county, net crop revenue per hectare was regressed on climate, household and soil variables. The results show that these variables have a significant impact on the net crop revenue per hectare of farmers under Ethiopian conditions. The seasonal marginal impact analysis indicates that marginally increasing temperature during summer and winter would significantly reduce crop net revenue per hectare whereas marginally increasing precipitation during spring would significantly increase net crop revenue per hectare. Moreover, the net crop revenue impact of predicted climate scenarios from three models (CGM2, HaDCM3 and PCM) for the years 2050 and 2100 indicated that there would be a reduction in crop net revenue per hectare by the years 2050 and 2100. Moreover, the reduction in net revenue per hectare by the year 2100 would be more than the reduction by the year 2050 indicating the damage that climate change would pose increases with time unless this negative impact is abated through adaptation. Additionally, results indicate that the net revenue impact of climate change is not uniformly distributed across the different agro-ecological zones of Ethiopia.

Using data from Kenya, the determinants of gender differences in the overall distribution of earnings are estimated as part of explaining the positive association between the return to measured and unmeasured human capital attributes as formalised by human capital theory (Mincer in ‘Schooling Experience, and Earnings’, New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, Columbia University Press, 1974). The Kenyan data allows us to demonstrate that males possess relatively more human capital, and once gender differences in measured and unmeasured skills are accounted for, males receive relatively higher returns to both their measured and unmeasured human capital attributes. These findings support the notion that gender differences in the return to human capital trigger male and female earnings differences in Kenya.

The under-utilisation of female labour in Uganda and other Sub-Saharan African countries is increasingly being stated as the next major obstacle to furthering poverty reduction and development in the region. Despite this, only a handful of papers have looked at labour supply issues for this region. This paper seeks to fill this gap. Here we use nationally representative household data from Uganda to model labour market outcomes for a representative sample of working aged individuals. We find that not only does ill health have a negative effect on an individual's decision to participate, it also acts as a constraint to participation in wage employment. In addition and perhaps more worryingly, the consequences of periods of ill health are greater for women than men.