IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jafrec/v27y2018i2p149-171..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Firm Survival and Change in Ghana, 2003–2013

Author

Listed:
  • Elwyn Davies
  • Andrew Kerr

Abstract

This paper explores the determinants of firm survival in Ghanaian manufacturing and the contributions of growth and selection to the evolution of the firm size distribution. For this analysis we created a two-wave panel spanning 10 years to study exit, growth and decline, by re-surveying 1000 firms randomly selected from the 2003 National Industrial Census. We find strong differences in exit patterns by region and firm size. Former owners and managers commonly cite personal circumstances as the reason for exit in the case of small firms and increasing costs in the case of large firms. We show that both growth and selection played only a small role in the evolution of the firm size distribution, contradicting earlier work on Ghana. Overall, the picture we paint of manufacturing in Ghana is not a positive one: total employment by firms operating before 2003 decreased from 134,863 in 2003 to 74,319 in 2013, although we cannot explore to what extent new employment in firms that entered after 2003—who were not surveyed—compensated for this decline.

Suggested Citation

  • Elwyn Davies & Andrew Kerr, 2018. "Firm Survival and Change in Ghana, 2003–2013," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 27(2), pages 149-171.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:27:y:2018:i:2:p:149-171.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejx023
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Florian Leon, 2019. "The elusive quest for high- growth firms in Africa: The (lack of) growth persistence in Senegal," Working Papers hal-02493326, HAL.
    2. Jun Hou & Xiaolan Fu & Pierre Mohnen, 2022. "The Impact of China–Africa Trade on the Productivity of African Firms: Evidence from Ghana," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 34(2), pages 869-896, April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:27:y:2018:i:2:p:149-171.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.