This Policy Arena examines some of the development challenges faced by SIDS. It brings together a collection of papers arising from the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) project [Fragility and Development]. These investigations were...

In August 2006 the South African government announced quotas on the imports of clothing and textile products from China. Three questions arise. What are these expected benefits? What will be the most likely impact of the import quotas on the South African economy? And what are the policy...

In this article, we provide an introduction to the Special Issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution devoted to the impact of violent conflict on entrepreneurship in developing countries. First we note that there is insufficient attention in the literature on the impact of violent conflict on...

Innovation has been acknowledged as contributing to development, in particularly inclusive innovations that involve and benefit poorer groups in developing countries. However, such innovation may have negative externalities. Most often external regulation is required to reduce these effects....

In this article, the question of the location of exporters of manufactured goods within a country is investigated. Data from 354 magisterial districts in South Africa are used with a variety of estimators to identify the determinants of regional manufactured exports. It is found that the...

We are the first to provide a comparative empirical analysis of non-farm entrepreneurship in rural Africa, using the World Bank's unique LSMSISA dataset. This dataset covers six countries over the period 2005 to 2012. We find that rural enterprises tend to be small, informal household...

In "new" new international trade theory, whether firms export or not are determined by their productivity. These models assume that firms enter a market to find their productivity levels revealed to them as in a lottery. In this paper we propose an alternative way to model whether firms export...

The productivity of non-farm enterprises in rural Africa may be associated with the productivity of other spatially proximate farm and non-farm enterprises. To test for the presence and significance of such spatial autocorrelation we use data from the geo-referenced 2011 Ethiopian Rural...

We refine modelling of the radical innovation decision in this paper by extending real option theory to include non-marginal stochastic jump processes. From the model analytics we determine that the average magnitude and frequency of non-marginal stochastic jump processes are the most important...