Economic Growth and Development

Spatial inequality in global economic development has left Africa with the least progress in improving living standards among developing regions of the world. Moreover, there are strong neighborhood effects within Africa. This paper revisits the explanation of unequal growth across countries in an African context. We argue that some of the lingering disagreements over the channels through which institutions and geography may explain differences in income per capita across countries could be resolved by accounting for neighborhood effects often overlooked in past analyses.

Over the last decades the world has witnessed a gradual relocation of manufacturing activities from developed to developing countries, opening up new opportunities for employment, increased income and economic growth for some of the world’s poorer and less developed countries. However, the process of industrialization has not benefitted all developing countries equally.

The main objective of the paper was to empirically investigate the possible impact of the DD effects on the economy of Botswana. The study tested the impacts of the diamond resource boom on the country’s manufacturing exports namely, textiles and motor vehicles; mining exports, namely copper and soda ash; and agricultural exports of meat and meat products. The study’s methodology borrows from Stijns (2003) in which a gravity trade model was used to test the DD, but with an added specific term to represent the DD in the model.

This presentation discusses the effects of FDI on agricultural supply chains.