Mozambique experienced important reduction in the poverty rate until recently, before two major natural disasters hit and the country started suffering from a hidden debt scandal with associated economic slowdown. As the last available national household expenditure survey is from 2014/15, just...

Who uses mobile money? What is mobile money used for? This paper describes the mobile money adoption patterns following the experimental introduction of mobile money for the first time in rural areas of Southern Mozambique. We use a combination of administrative and household survey data to...

Inaccurate expectations of future wages are found in many contexts. Yet, existing studies overwhelmingly refer to high-income countries, and there is little evidence regarding the sources of expectational errors. Based on a longitudinal survey of graduates from the six largest universities in...

Mozambique is among the most disaster-prone countries in the world. A bigger than usual, and mostly unexpected, flood occurred in the central-northern region of the country in the first few months of 2015, causing huge damage to infrastructures. In this paper, we use a nationally representative...

The political resource curse is the idea that natural resources can lead to the deterioration of public policies through corruption and rent-seeking by those closest to political power. One prominent consequence is the emergence of conflict. This paper takes this theory to the data for the case...

Entrepreneurship is widely argued to be critical for economic development and alleviating extreme poverty. However, entrepreneurship research in sub-Saharan Africa has not received much attention over the last few decades possibly due to a lack of sufficient resources. It is becoming...

This paper considers the impact of agriculture and international trade development on income distribution and economic activity in Mozambique. A social accounting matrix multiplier decomposition model is used -- in particular, an extension of the standard model that details the process of income...

Investment in improved agricultural inputs is infrequent for smallholder farmers in Africa. One barrier may be limited access to formal savings. This is the first study to use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of using mobile money as a tool to promote agricultural investment....

The recent discovery of large fields of natural gas in Mozambique has led to great international interest and expectations of future gains. However, many resource-rich countries have struggled to achieve long-term sustainable growth, whether because of poor management, unequal outcomes, or...

This paper is a sequel to an earlier paper that looked in broad terms at many of the issues that Mozambique faces today in managing its new extractive resources. The paper first describes the investment surge that has already been prompted by new gas discoveries in Mozambique. It then summarizes...

Mozambique is a low-income, Southern African nation with an estimated population of 28 million people, 67 per cent of whom live in rural areas. Women comprise 51 per cent of the population, and 45 per cent of the population are under 15 years old (World Bank 2015). (...)

This paper estimates how private returns to education have evolved in the context of postconflict transformation in Mozambique. This has been characterized by rapid economic growth, significant expansion of the schooling system, but also limited structural change in a labour market dominated by...

This paper is the first to use a panel dataset from the African continent to investigate the relationship between formalization and firm outcomes. Instead of applying a binary formality indicator, it constructs a conceptual framework that regards informality as a continuum consisting of four...

In recent years, Mozambique has made international headlines for the significant hydrocarbon deposits found offshore. These have increased the country's extractive resource endowments, in addition to its mining and onshore natural gas sector. It is expected that these industries will contribute...

The construction sector value added in Mozambique grew at an average annual rate of 12.8 per cent in 1993-2015. Investment in the basic infrastructure of health, education, and housing improved families' and communities' living conditions. Investment in roads, communications, and office...

We measure the impact of search costs on farmers' and traders' transaction prices in Mozambique by investigating to what extent the introduction of mobile phones has affected the margin between recorded maize producer and retail market prices, and by exploring if producers or traders benefit...

This paper documents a 2015 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Mozambique. The SAM is built using unpublished Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE) industry-level production accounts, commodity-level supply-demand balances and a supply matrix, together with national accounts, National...

This paper analyses the implication of contract farming on gender inequalities in rural Mozambique. Contract farming is often considered one of the major tools of agribusiness development: it broadly includes those arrangements under which producers commit to provide a pre-defined quantity of...

In common with several other low-income African economies, in recent years Mozambique has seen a significant expansion of interest and investment in its long-established extractives industries. Huge new gas finds in particular have led to expectations that these industries will contribute very...

In this paper, I quantify the contribution of a subpopulation to inequality. This is defined as the sum of the contributions of its members, with these contributions computed as the impact on inequality of a small increase in the population mass at each point of the distribution (using the...

Poverty declined substantially in Mozambique between 1996/97 and 2014/15. However, the recent economic crisis, characterized by a significant increase in domestic prices, may have dragged several households into poverty. Using consumer price index and 2014/15 household budged survey data, we...

This paper reflects on the relationship between economic (quantitative) and anthropological (qualitative) approaches to the analysis of poverty in developing countries. Drawing on detailed evidence from Mozambique, we argue that different research approaches do not merely see the same poverty...

Education conditional cash transfer programs may increase school attendance in part due to the information they transmit to parents about their child's attendance. This paper presents experimental evidence that the information content of an education conditional cash transfer program, when given...

"What history and motivations make up the discourses we are taught to hold, and spread, as common sense? As a member of Brazil's upper middle class, Ana Beatriz Ribeiro grew up with the image that to be developed was to be as European as possible. However, as a researcher in Europe during her...

Household budget surveys in sub-Saharan Africa are designed to facilitate poverty measurement and may fail to fully capture consumption in wealthy households. As a result, inequality is likely underestimated. We address upper tier consumption underreporting by aligning consumption derived from...

Efficient transport links are critical to enhancing the integration of markets in Southern Africa. This paper assesses the structure of markets, competition, and prices and costs of road transportation between urban hubs in Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Key findings are...

Expansion of biofuels production and consumption at the regional and national levels relies on both supportive energy prices and policy interventions. Despite enthusiasm for policy interventions to stimulate biofuel production in Southern African countries in the mid-2000s, the years since have...