Trade Openness, Institutions, and Inclusive Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Trade Openness, Trade Costs and Growth: Why Sub-Saharan Africa Performs Poorly

The principal aim of this paper is to identify, in the context of the relationship between openness and growth, factors that can account for the poor growth performance of subSaharan African (SSA) countries. Including inequality as a broad measure of policy distortions, attention focuses on policy and non-policy barriers to trade, indicators of openness and resource endowments. The empirical an...

Trade Causes Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expresse...

Exports, Trade Liberalization and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Trade Liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Stagnation or Growth?

This paper argues that the greater the liberalization of imports in a Sub-Saharan African country, the more significant is the decline in its rate of growth due to the recession in high income economies during the late eighties and early nineties. This could be explained by the fact that when industrial countries are suffering from recession, the terms of trade may move in favor of developing c...

Political institutions and developmental governance in sub-Saharan Africa

This article addresses the question of whether, or under what conditions, democratic institutions contribute to ‘developmental governance’ in sub-Saharan Africa, in forms such as coherent policy formulation, effective public administration, and limited corruption. While few dispute the desirability for Africa of democracy and good governance in theory, many remain sceptical about whether the tw...