Agrifood standards impede trade by increasing compliance costs, but they can also enhance trade by signalling quality. This paper disentangles the trade costs and demand-enhancing effects of two important standards-technical barriers to trade, and sanitary and phytosanitary measures-on (i)...

This paper investigates the impact of foreign direct investment on total factor productivity conditional on relative backwardness in a panel of 45 African countries over the period 1980-2012. We use two measures of relative backwardness, namely: the distance from technological frontier and the...

This study investigates the causal links among agricultural imports, agriculture productivity, and economic growth in 40 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1990-2015. Granger causality tests are applied to infer direction of causality, and the generalized two-stage least squares...

Several methods are used to evaluate competitiveness, but the non-inclusion of quality measures, despite their importance in international product markets, gives less credence to such assessments. This study evaluates export competitiveness in the cocoa sector from the context of pesticide...

Regional integration occupies a prominent place in the economic policies of most sub-Saharan African countries. However, despite different waves of initiatives across the African continent, the majority of African regional schemes have not managed to achieve their ambitious goal of promoting...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Africa has surged in recent years. At the same time, international trade has increased, exposing African countries to international competition. This raises the question of whether FDI plays a role in enhancing export competitiveness. This study investigates...

We construct a theoretical model that examines the relationship between HIV/AIDS and foreign direct investment and employ panel data from 41 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to test the implications of the model. We find that HIV/AIDS has a negative but diminishing effect on FDI....

This paper explores the relationship between the ease of doing business, as one of the investment climate indicators, and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in Africa. It uses instrumental variable estimation and the control function approach to correct for possible endogeneity between FDI...