IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/28344.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Africa's Manufacturing Puzzle: Evidence from Tanzanian and Ethiopian Firms

Author

Listed:
  • Xinshen Diao
  • Mia Ellis
  • Margaret S. McMillan
  • Dani Rodrik

Abstract

Recent growth accelerations in Africa are characterized by increasing productivity in agriculture, a declining share of the labor force employed in agriculture and declining productivity in modern sectors such as manufacturing. To shed light on this puzzle, we disaggregate firms in the manufacturing sector by size using two newly created panels of manufacturing firms, one for Tanzania covering 2008-2016 and one for Ethiopia covering 1996-2017. Our analysis reveals a dichotomy between larger firms that exhibit superior productivity performance but do not expand employment much, and small firms that absorb employment but do not experience any productivity growth. We suggest the poor employment performance of large firms is related to use of capital-intensive techniques associated with global trends in technology.

Suggested Citation

  • Xinshen Diao & Mia Ellis & Margaret S. McMillan & Dani Rodrik, 2021. "Africa's Manufacturing Puzzle: Evidence from Tanzanian and Ethiopian Firms," NBER Working Papers 28344, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28344
    Note: DEV ITI PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w28344.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:nbr:nberwo:28344. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.