The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

This paper uses comprehensive and comparable firm-level manufacturing censuses from four Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to examine the extent, costs, and nature of within-industry resource misallocation between heterogeneous production units. This paper finds evidence of severe misallocation in which resources are diverted away from high-productivity firms towards low-productivity ones, although the magnitude differs across countries. Estimated aggregate productivity gains from the hypothetical equalization of marginal returns range from 30 percent in Côte d’Ivoire to 160 percent in Kenya. The magnitude of reallocation gains appears considerably lower when performing the same counterfactual exercise based on the World Bank Enterprise Surveys once the value-added shares of industries are adjusted using the census data. This suggests that linking firm-level survey data to aggregate outcomes requires census-type data or sampling methods that take the true structure of production into account.

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