Exporting higher-quality and complex products are deemed pathways to economic growth and development. However, producing such products are knowledge-intensive and require quality intermediate inputs and advanced technologies. Integration into global trade networks is increasingly argued to be amongst the pathways to obtain such inputs and technologies, although not all countries may benefit equally from such integration. This paper builds on these arguments and investigates how participation in the global value chain (GVC) affects export-quality. We use a sample of 120 developed and developing countries and find that participation in GVC impacts positively on export quality and, also, brings the export quality of countries closer to the quality frontier, but these effects only work through backward linkages. While this result persists in the sub-sample comprising developing economies, we, however, find that developed countries benefit from both forward and backward linkages in GVC. Overall, the results indicate that GVC participation matters to export upgrading but points to a potential heterogeneity on the channel of impact across countries at different levels of development.

This paper presents a shift-share decomposition of the role of structural change in driving labour productivity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The paper further examines the effect that the observed structural change has had upon the dynamics of labour markets in SSA. The analysis is based on a newly constructed dataset, the Extended Africa Sector Database. This database updates and extends the Africa Sector Database of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre. It includes eighteen countries covering the period 1960–2015. Overall, the database shows that productivity growth has been slow, with large and persistent sectoral productivity gaps present. The extent of structural change has been higher than that observed in previous studies, however. But while the share of employment and value added in agriculture has declined, resources have been pulled into certain service sectors that have relatively low productivity, thus limiting aggregate productivity improvements. The general direction of structural change has not been towards the most productive sectors. Results of the labour market analysis complement this analysis, providing suggestive evidence of a role for labour market institutional arrangements in many SSA countries in affecting these outcomes.