The cocoa sector in Ghana is one of few examples of an export commodity sector in an African country that has withstood the pressure to fully liberalize. Despite substantial government control over internal and external marketing via the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), the current institutional...

"The deregulation of Ghana’s domestic cocoa supply chain that took place in the early 1990s was expected to bring competition among different private buyers and to generate a number of production incentives to the farmers. Most notably, it was expected that competition would emerge by...

"Using a two year panel dataset, this paper offers an empirical investigation of the unprecedented production boom episode observed in Ghana's cocoa sector between 2002 and 2004. We look at the technology of production underlying the years of the boom, and suggest that most of the rise was due...

In this paper we investigate a `global' production function for agriculture, using FAO data for 128 countries from 1961-2002. Our review of the empirical literature in this field highlights that existing cross-country studies largely neglect variable time-series properties, parameter...

Since the seminal contribution of Gregory Mankiw, David Romer and David Weil (1992), the growth empirics literature has used increasingly sophisticated methods to select relevant growth determinants in estimating cross-section growth regressions. The vast majority of empirical approaches however...

In this paper we ask how technological differences in manufacturing across countries can best be modeled when using a standard production function approach. We show that it is important to allow for differences in technology as measured by differences in parameters. Of similar importance are...