Suchergebnisse

"Voxi Heinrich Amavilah examines the factors and forces that explain the unexpectedly good performance of Sub-Saharan African countries just before the 2008 global recession, including newer technologies, globalization, governance, and conventional determinants of economic performance."

One of the key economic development challenges facing Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is its low agricultural productivity. Governments, donors, and foreign investors have underinvested in African agriculture even though research evidence shows that higher agricultural productivity would boost economic growth and poverty reduction. Solutions to the problem require a number of interconnected strategies, including, but not limited to, research on seeds and inputs, extension services, rural development, credit, institutional, and trade and price stabilization policies. We use the system two-step Generalized Method of Moments to examine whether official development assistance (ODA) for agriculture and rural development is helping to boost agricultural productivity. We find a positive relationship between ODA and agricultural productivity. However, when broken down into the main agricultural ODA recipient sectors, there is a substitution effect between food crop production and industrial crop production. While there exists a positive relationship between ODA for industrial and export crops output per worker (agricultural productivity), ODA for food crops has a negative relationship. Better public institutions and economic freedom are also found to enable agricultural productivity growth and to increase the ODA effectiveness. We correct the results for spurious correlation assuming that more ODA might be allocated where agricultural productivity is already increasing due to some other factors. Concerning the determinants of ODA allocation, we find that the allocation of ODA for agriculture is primarily determined by agricultural need, and that the expected effectiveness increases the ODA receipts. Finally, there is a weak ODA-led structural economic change effect in SSA. Labor released from agriculture to the urban sector(s) has a positive market effect on agriculture but is not engendering significant structural economic transformation.

We argue that there exists an indirect link between globalization and the knowledge economy of African countries in which globalization influences 'peace and stability' and peace and stability affects governance, and through governance the knowledge economy. We model the link as a three-stage process in four testable hypotheses, which permits an empirical analysis without sacrificing economic relevance for statistical significance. The results indicate that the impacts on governance of peace and stability from globalization defined as trade are stronger than those of peace and stability resulting from globalization taken to be foreign direct investment. We conclude that foreign direct investment is not a powerful mechanism for stimulating and sustaining the African knowledge. However, since the effects of globalization on peace and stability can influence governance both positively and negatively, we also conclude that the prospect for the knowledge economy in African countries may be realistic and attainable, as long as these countries continue to engage in the kind of globalization that enhances peace and stability.