This report provides an overview of current research on and knowledge about employment trends and policies in sub-Saharan Africa. Access to productive employment is seen as essential for poverty reduction and the inclusion of the poor in wider society. Productive employment is characterised by...

This paper examines the discovery process of a recent and extraordinarily successful, nontraditional, export activity in developing country - namely the flower industry in Ethiopia. To be able to break into non-traditional exports, developing countries do not need to invent new products, but...

This paper addresses two prominent issues on the development of small enterprises in Africa. Which factors inhibit or foster innovation activities in small enterprises? Do innovators create more jobs? We use a large set of microenterprises survey data from Ethiopia that comprise 1000...

This study focuses on innovation in a cluster of informal shoemaking firms in Ethiopia - namely the Mercato footwear cluster. It examines how differently those firms are embedded in networks and how heterogeneous they are in absorptive capacity, and how this heterogeneity affects their...

Due to recent revival of interest on industrial policy, there have been many attempts to design policy tools to facilitate the successful emergence of new industry, which in turn may help developing countries to transform structurally to a developmental path. Often, however, the existing policy...

This paper examines the causal relationship between exporting and productivity using a ten years long plant-level panel data set from an annual census of Ethiopian manufacturing, rarely available in the sub-Saharan Africa. We exploited its length to trace the trajectory of TFP and other...

Ethiopia represents an excellent case study of recent industrial policy experimentation in Africa. The country is well known for its successful promotion of the cut-flower industry through business-government co-ordination. What is less known is that at n

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in industrial policy. This paper examines the choices, implementation processes, and outcomes of the Ethiopian present industrial policy. The country represents an excellent case study of recent industrial

We use census panel data on Ethiopian manufacturing firms to analyze the connections between enterprise agglomeration, firm-level output prices and physical productivity. We find a negative and statistically significant relationship between the agglomerat

<title>A<sc>bstract</sc> </title> This article provides a case study of the Ethiopian flower export industry which successfully emerged at time when the EU market (main destination) was already characterised by increasingly stringent standards and delivery requirements. Entering this market required a multitude of...