This paper looks at the relationship between natural resource degradation and income diversification for fishing communities in southern Benin. We find that the higher the degradation of the fishery stock, the more fishers diversify their income away from the fishery sector. However, given the...

This article analyzes data on self-reported food insecurity of more than 50,000 individuals in 18 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2005–2008, when global food prices increased dramatically. The average level of self-reported food insecurity was high but remarkably stable over...

Starting out as a Large-Scale Mining (LSM) activity in the colonial period, gold mining became more and more dominated by artisanal miners in the course of the past decades. Now, the pendulum swings back to LSM. What is the scope for a relocation and/or reorientation of artisanal miners? We...

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...

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 study the co-existence of two community-based institutions for fisheries management in Benin: a traditional institution embedded in the Voodoo religion and a recent secular institution in the form of fishing committees. Using household survey data on fishing activities, we find that rules of...

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...

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...

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...