We employ bootstrap techniques in a production frontier framework to provide statistical inference for each component in the decomposition of labor productivity growth, which has essentially been ignored in this literature. We show that only two of the four components (efficiency changes and...

The inability of Benin to comply with EU standards led to a ban on its shrimp exports. We show that the ban had a negative impact on the income of fishmongers and fishermen, in the short run, but also several years after it was lifted. The impact persisted because exports to the EU did not...

Benin’s shrimp sector collapsed following a ban on its exports to the EU. The ban was imposed in July 2003 and resulted from the non-compliance with EU food safety standards. Strikingly, the sector did not revive, despite the lift of the ban in 2005 and considerable Aid for Trade flows. We...

We examine the role of global and domestic shocks in driving macroeconomic fluctuations for Ghana. We are able to study the impact of exogenous shocks including productivity, credit supply, and commodity price shocks. We identify the shocks with a combination of sign and recursive restrictions...

The inability of Benin to comply with EU standards led to a ban on its shrimp exports. The ban had a negative impact on the exporting firms, the fishmongers and the artisanal fishermen, even several years after it was lifted. Exports did not revive because local and international institutions...

We analyse the costs of a monetary union in West Africa by means of asymmetric aggregate demand and aggregate supply shocks. Previous studies have estimated the shocks with the VAR model.We discuss the limits of this approach and apply a new technique based on the dynamic factor model.The...

This paper develops a Spatial Vector Auto-Regressive (SpVAR) model that takes into account both the time and the spatial dimensions of economic shocks. We apply this framework to analyze the propagation through space and time of macroeconomic (inflation, output gap and interest rate) shocks in...

We analyse the costs of a monetary union in West Africa by means of asymmetric aggregate demand and aggregate supply shocks. Previous studies have estimated the shocks with the VAR model. We discuss the limitations of this approach and apply a new technique based on the dynamic factor model. The...

The Ghana cocoa market has been extensively liberalised over the period since the mid 1980s. Three issues have been prominent in microeconomic research on the effects of liberalisation on agriculture. The first has been the size of any supply response, the second has been the effect on producers...