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on Africa |
| By: | Bertrand Laporte (CERDI - Centre d'études et de recherches sur le developpement international - CNRS - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I); Celine De Quatrebarbes (FERDI - Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Développement International - FERDI) |
| Abstract: | Governments that lack the capacity to mine resources themselves have to attract foreign direct investment. However, since resources are not renewable, countries need to capture a ‘fair’ share of mineral resource rent to promote their development. While the third raw materials super cycle increased the global turnover of the mining sector by a factor of 4.6 between 2002 and 2010, the tax revenues from the non-renewable natural resource sector earned by African governments only grew by a factor of 1.15. The sharing of mineral resource rent between governments and investors is often criticised for being unfavourable to African governments. But what do we really know about the mineral resource rent sharing in Africa? The aim of this study is to review theoretical and empirical studies on rent sharing in Africa and note their limits for the knowledge of the actual mineral rent sharing. |
| Date: | 2015–04–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01146261&r=all |
| By: | Brixiova, Zuzana (University of Cape Town); Kangoye, Thierry (African Development Bank) |
| Abstract: | This paper contributes to closing a knowledge gap on gender, entrepreneurship and development by linking the entrepreneurial productivity to start-up capital and skills. The empirical analysis of a survey of entrepreneurs in Swaziland confirmed the importance of start-up capital for sales. Women entrepreneurs have smaller start-up capital and are less likely to fund it from the formal sector than their men counterparts, pointing to a possible room for policy interventions. Further, business training is positively associated with sales performance of men entrepreneurs, but has no effect on women. However, this does not call for abolishing training programs for women entrepreneurs. Instead their design and targeting should be revisited. |
| Keywords: | gender and entrepreneurship, start-up capital, skills, training, multivariate analysis |
| JEL: | L53 O12 |
| Date: | 2015–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9273&r=all |
| By: | Mehmet Balcilar (Department of Economics, Eastern Mediterranean University); Rangan Gupta (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria); Charl Jooste (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria); Omid Ranjbar (Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade, Tehran, Iran) |
| Abstract: | We test for a unit root in de-trended GDP in a two-state Markov switching specification using a modified Augmented Dickey-Fuller test. Our results show that a first difference GDP specification is preferred over the de-trended specification. In addition, the null of difference-stationary GDP cannot be rejected. By implication, shocks to GDP are permanent which validates specifying trend GDP with a stochastic component -something that is inherently assumed in a number of research papers that estimate potential GDP growth and that model GDP in general equilibrium specifications. |
| Keywords: | Markov-switching; difference-stationary; trend-stationary; |
| JEL: | C22 C25 E32 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:emu:wpaper:15-04.pdf&r=all |