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Africa's Lions examines the economic growth experiences of six fast-growing and/or economically dominant African countries. Expert African researchers offer unique perspectives into the challenges and issues in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and South Africa. Despite a growing body of research on African economies, very little research has focused on the relationship between economic growth and employment outcomes at the detailed country level. A lack of empirical data has, in many cases, deprived policymakers of a robust evidence base on which to make informed decisions. By harnessing country-level household, firm, and national accounts data, together with existing analytical country research, the authors have attempted to bridge this gap

Much of the information relevant to policy formulation for industrial development is held by the private sector, not by public officials. There is, therefore, fairly broad agreement in the development literature that some form of structured engagement—often referred to as close or strategic coordination—between the public and private sectors is needed, to assist in the design of appropriate policies and provide feedback on their implementation. There is less agreement on how that engagement should be structured, how its objectives be defined, and how success be measured. In fact, the academic literature provides little practical guidance on how governments interested in developing such a framework should go about doing it. The burden of this lack of guidance falls most heavily on Africa, where—despite twenty years of growth—lack of structural transformation has slowed job creation and the pace of poverty reduction. In 2014, the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) launched a joint research project: The Practice of Industrial Policy. The aim is to help African policy makers develop better coordination between public and private sectors in order to identify the constraints to faster structural transformation and design, implement, and monitor policies to remove them. This book, written by national researchers and international experts, presents the results of that research by combining a set of analytical 'framing' essays on close coordination with case studies of successful and unsuccessful efforts at close coordination in Africa and in comparator countries.

Detailed analyses of poverty and wellbeing in developing countries, based on household surveys, have been ongoing for more than three decades. The large majority of developing countries now regularly conduct a variety of household surveys, and their information base with respect to poverty and wellbeing has improved dramatically. Nevertheless, appropriate measurement of poverty remains complex and controversial. This is particularly true in developing countries where (i) the stakes with respect to poverty reduction are high; (ii) the determinants of living standards are often volatile; and (iii) related information bases, while much improved, are often characterized by significant non-sample error. It also remains, to a surprisingly high degree, an activity undertaken by technical assistance personnel and consultants based in developed countries. This book seeks to enhance the transparency, replicability, and comparability of existing practice. It also aims to significantly lower the barriers to entry to the conduct of rigorous poverty measurement and increase the participation of analysts from developing countries in their own poverty assessments. The book focuses on two domains: the measurement of absolute consumption poverty and a first-order dominance approach to multidimensional welfare analysis. In each domain, it provides a series of computer codes designed to facilitate analysis by allowing the analyst to start from a flexible and known base. The volume covers the theoretical grounding for the code streams provided, a chapter on 'estimation in practice', a series of eleven case studies where the code streams are operationalized, a synthesis, an extension to inequality, and a look forward.

What are the macroeconomic prospects for South Africa until the new millennium? Two methods of macroeconomic modelling, associated with the World Bank and IMF, are used here to generate three scenarios, based on moderately optimistic projections. The methodology used can be applied to other developing countries.

AbstractTaking advantage of the 2019/2020 Mozambican household budget survey, in the field both before and during the first phases of the Covid-19 pandemic, we assess the impact of Covid-19 on welfare in 2020, aiming to disentangle this impact from the effect of other shocks. Comparing a number of welfare metrics, and applying propensity score matching and inverse probability weighted regression adjustment approaches, we find that consumption levels are significantly lower and poverty rates substantially higher during the first phases of Covid-19 than in the pre-Covid-19 period. Moreover, the impact was greater in urban areas and accordingly in the more urbanised southern region. Non-food expenditures suffered relatively more than food expenditures, likely a coping strategy, while the impact on consumption levels was greater for people working in the secondary and tertiary sectors than for workers in the primary sector, mainly agriculture. Stunting among under-5 children also suffered. Only a limited number of countries have actual, collected in-person, survey data that span across the initial phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, the present analysis adds value to our understanding of the welfare consequences of Covid-19 in a low-income context, where automatic social safety nets were not in place during the early phases of the pandemic. More specifically, it helps in assessing the results of previous welfare impact simulations, compared to real data. Even though our main findings are broadly in line with existing estimates based on simulations or phone surveys, important differences between the predictions and the actual results emerge. We conclude that it is critically important for Mozambique and its development partners to develop stronger and more targeted policies and tools to respond to temporary shocks.

Using a unique panel survey of enterprises, we examine the relationship between four categories of formalization and firm productivity. We carry out one- and two-step productivity estimations whose robustness we check with matching and doubly robust estimators. The only formalization category that appears to be significantly associated with productivity is tax formalization, i.e. a firm's decision to pay taxes. This positive association only holds for firms that were already more productive and bigger before formalizing than other informal firms. The reason for the insignificance of the remaining three categories is likely to be the insignificant association between formalization and potential benefits of formalization, such as more access to credit, employees, and investments. High taxes and fees linked to formalization seem to outweigh the few to non-existent intermediate benefits of formalization.

Natural resources can make diversification and structural change more challenging. This chapter focuses on why public policy matters. International competitiveness depends on both relative prices and on the policy and institutional changes and investments that governments make to enhance it. Drawing on the five country case studies in this volume, the authors suggest lessons for the design of policies to promote structural change in Africa's resource exporters. They address the three key themes—managing the boom, the construction sector, and linking industry to the resource—then propose ideas for widening options for structural change. These include reforms to deal with 'Dutch disease', expanding the concept of structural change from a focus on industrialization to 'industries without smokestacks', and investing in knowledge.

Tax, and public-sector matters more generally, is high on the agenda of international development. This is clearly reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) approved by the United Nations General Assembly in September of 2015. SDG17 addresses the need for improving domestic resource mobilization (DRM) directly, and most of the other SDGs cannot be achieved without adequate tax and spending policies. To give just a few examples, SDG10 (reduced inequalities) will depend on government capacity to redistribute income, whereas SDG8 (decent work) requires that tax systems do not create an unnecessarily large burden on economic efficiency. Together these goals reflect the classic efficiency–equity trade-off, which is at the heart of public economics research and policy analysis. Finally, unless all households have sufficient market income (a highly unlikely scenario), the very first SDG (eradicating poverty) requires the presence of social safety nets, which must be financed by public monies. This is the backdrop, against which UNU-WIDER organized a WIDER Development Conference on the theme of "Public Economics for Development" in Maputo, Mozambique, 5–6 July 2017. The conference was wide-ranging, including papers and keynote lectures on all areas of public economics, as applied to developing country contexts. This special issue includes five studies from the conference. In what follows, we first reflect briefly on a set of key issues when researching the public sector in developing countries before summarizing the selected articles.

There is increasing recognition that the market imperfections on which theoretical arguments for industrial policies rest are widespread in low-income countries, and that well-designed government policies can contribute to improved economic outcomes. There is also greater understanding that the private sector has a central role to play in formulating and implementing industrial policy. Because much of the information relevant to policy-making is held by firms, some form of structured engagement—often referred to as close or strategic coordination—between the public and private sectors is needed, both to assist in the design of appropriate public actions and to provide effective feedback on their implementation. This introductory chapter provides an overview of common themes and outlines a set of forward-looking ideas for strengthening public–private coordination in Africa. It argues that these ideas must form part of any development agenda for Africa in the years to come.

The notion that foreign aid harms the institutions of recipient governments remains prevalent. We combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship. Long-run cross-section and alternative dynamic panel estimators show a small positive net effect of total aid on political institutions. Distinguishing between types of aid according to their frequency domain and stated objectives, we find this aggregate net effect is driven primarily by the positive contribution of more stable inflows of 'governance aid'. We conclude the data do not support the view that aid has had a systematic negative effect on political institutions.