The second half of the 20th century has seen West Africa move from being an essentially rural society to a mainly urban one. This process has occured at varying speeds in different countries, often depending on economic growth, but in every case national resource have fallen far short of what is...

The purpose of this paper is to review available statistical and in-formational databases in order to understand the actual importance of Chinese direct investment in Africa and to infer its strategic significance. Hence, I shall successively present three main data and information sources, then...

One of the most dramatic events in Nigeria over the past decade was the devaluation of the Nigerian naira with the adoption of a structural adjustment programme (SAP) in 1986. A cardinal objective of the SAP was the restructuring of the production base of the economy with a positive bias for the...

This paper traces the evolution of Workd Bank support to agricultural services, particularly extension and research, in Sub-Saharan Africa from the early 1970s to the present.

This paper, prepared by the Private Sector Development Department at the initiative of the Africa Technical Department of the World Bank, examines the promise and challenge of infrastructure privatization in Sub-Saharan Africa, with particular emphasis on power, telecommunications, water, rail,...

Water resources in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have become a strategic commodity, with supply limited in terms of quantity and quality, and demand increasing due to population growth and economic development. The strategy developed in this document is based on the principle that water is a scarce...

This "Bibliography of Publications" of the Technical Department, Africa Region of the World Bank makes available a complete list of all formal and informal publications produced by the staff and consultants of the Africa Technical Department from July 1987 through April 1996. The publications...

This paper makes available a list of formal and informal publications produced by the staff and consultants of the Africa Region from 1993 through April 1998. It covers the region's work in Africa in all sectors. Publications listed in the bibliography include World Bank Technical Papers,...

In this paper, we use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries, to estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Measures of firm-level efficiency using stochastic production frontier models are constructed for the period 1992 to 1995.

This econometric study takes a simulation approach to investigate the impact of external debt on economic growth in sub-Saharan African countries using a small macroeconomic model estimated for 1970-1994. An important finding was the significance of debt overhang variables in the investment...