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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper uses a pooled sample of the 1998 and 2003 Demographic and Health Survey data sets for Kenya to analyse the determinants of children's nutritional status. We investigate the impact of child, parental, household and community characteristics on children's height and on the probability of stunting. Descriptive and econometric analysis, augmented by policy simulations, is employed to achieve the objectives of the study. In estimation, we control for sample design and possible heterogeneity arising from unobserved community characteristics correlated with children's nutritional status and its determinants. The key findings are that boys suffer more malnutrition than girls, and children of multiple births are more likely to be malnourished than singletons. The results further indicate that maternal education is a more important determinant of children's nutritional status than paternal education. Household assets are also important determinants of children's nutritional status but nutrition improves at a decreasing rate with assets. The use of public health services, more-so modern contraceptives, is also found to be an important determinant of child nutritional status. Policy simulations affirm the potential role of parental, household and community characteristics in reducing long-term malnutrition in Kenya and suggest that the correct policy mix would make a substantial reduction in the current high levels of malnutrition. Our findings suggest that, if Kenya is to achieve her strategic health objectives and millennium development target of reducing the prevalence of malnutrition, strategies for poverty alleviation, promotion of post secondary education for women and provision of basic preventive health care are critical concerns that need to be addressed.

This paper explores how the elimination of Madagascar's Vanilla Marketing Board (VMB) in 1993 affected prices paid to farmers, incentives and indicators of poverty and inequality using household survey data and simulation analysis. Following the reforms, margins between FOB and farmgate prices have narrowed down, and the analysis of changes in poverty and inequality based on household surveys suggests a reduction in poverty and a muted supply response. A counterfactual analysis based on the observed reduction in intermediation margins shows that, however limited, increase in competition among intermediaries has contributed to raise purchase prices and the cash income of vanilla farmers. After taking into account the reduction in Madagascar's monopoly power on the world vanilla market implied by the elimination of the VMB, the induced rise in producer prices is estimated to have lifted about 20,000 individuals out of poverty.

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.

The African cash crop sector has witnessed widespread liberalisation reforms aimed at strengthening price incentives to farmers. However, some areas are confronted with a decline in input use. We have recourse to a two-stage Cournot game to account for the issue. In a context of credit rationing and imperfect contract enforceability, competition has the effect of tightening the input availability constraint while increasing the shadow value of credit. First, contrary to expectations, the impact of an extension of access to farm credit on aggregate input use, efficiency and peasants' income is shown to be ambiguous. Intuitively, relaxing the liquidity constraint entails a higher price elasticity of supply that results in a reduction of traders' profit margin. As a consequence, traders' incentives to contribute to input availability are weakened. The effects of subsidising inputs are also analysed. Second, normative insights are drawn regarding second best combinations of imperfect credit and output markets. Finally, the issue and consequences of contract unenforceability are discussed.

This paper examines the initial effects of the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) in January 1997 on school entry in Uganda. Given that advanced age at school entry has historically been associated with primary school dropout, the paper focuses on the the effects of fee elimination on the age at which a child enters school. Data from the 2000 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey and 2001 Education Data Survey are employed to examine the effects of UPE on the probability that a child begins attending school before age nine. School fee elimination under UPE is found to cause a 3% increase in this probability on average. Effects are found to be particularly pronounced for girls and children living in rural areas.

Business cycle synchronicity, which is the key requirement for sharing a common currency, is not particularly strong within the prospective African monetary unions. However, this parameter is not irrevocably fixed and may be endogeneous vis-à-vis the integration process. For example, trade may increase the similarity of economic disturbances. This paper tests such an effect among the 53 African countries from 1965 to 2004. The estimated results suggest that trade intensity increases the synchronisation of business cycles in the African context. The magnitude of the ‘endogeneity effect’ is, however, smaller than similar estimates among industrial countries.

We use a survey of small rural enterprises from Tanzania to identify subjective as well as objective obstacles to expansion and productivity of the country's rural non-farm sector. Our results suggest that infrastructure constraints significantly reduce participation in the sector and investment and productivity by existing enterprises. Such constraints are particularly harmful for small enterprises, suggesting that policies to improve delivery of key public services can provide a basis for rural non-farm development, with possible knock-on effects on poverty reduction.

The paper investigates birth weight and its correlates in Kenya using nationally representative data collected by the government in the early 1990s. I find that immunisation of the mother against tetanus during pregnancy is strongly associated with improvements in birth weight. Other factors significantly correlated with birth weight include age of mother at first birth and birth orders of siblings. It is further found that birth weight is positively associated with mother's age at first birth and with higher birth orders, with the firstborn child being substantially lighter than subsequent children. Newborn infants born in urban areas are heavier than those from rural areas and females are lighter than males. There is evidence suggesting that a baby born at a clinic is heavier than a newborn baby drawn randomly from the general population.

Forests play an important role in contributing to the food security of a large portion of Africa's food insecure. However, under current practices, this contribution is not sustainable because forests are experiencing a high rate of depletion in this continent. This paper investigates the immediate factors of deforestation in Cameroon in relation to food security of poor populations. Quantitative estimates show that cocoa producer prices, food crop prices and timber export price index on one hand, and the oil boom, the structural adjustment policies and the devaluation of the CFA franc on the other hand are quite important in stimulating the clearing of forests. Equally, the agricultural value added per hectare increases the profitability of maintaining forests. Finally, food security has a negative relationship with forest depletion. Therefore, in order to protect the remaining forest areas and render the contribution of forests to food security sustainable, attention to non-forest policies should be a first-order priority in the future.

In this article, the food consumption patterns of poor rural smallholder farmers in Uganda are explored to see if they suggest useful ways for household welfare rankings. For this purpose, a ranking and testing procedure is developed to assert if people consume food items in a particular dominant order. The methodology is used to construct the so-called ‘hierarchy of menus’, which outline people's priorities over a given set of consumption items. These hierarchies are compared and contrasted across different locations and with formal household survey expenditure data. Furthermore, it is illustrated how information on food priorities and underlying welfare distributions can be combined into a cost-effective instrument for poverty monitoring and as input into policymaking.