Structural Transformation and Its Relevance for Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

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Rural Employment in Africa: Trends and Challenges

“…The insight that agriculture is not intrinsically less productive and the wide range in labor productivity observed across farms further suggest that raising labor productivity within the sector is feasible and that farming can be profitable, also in Africa. Accordingly, countries with the highest rates of agricultural productivity growth have been observed to experience the most rapid transition of the labor force out of agriculture (Yeboah and Jayne, 2018;Busse et al, 2019).…”

“…Overall, the results suggest that African countries are in many ways still at the beginning of their agricultural and rural transformation, especially in Eastern and Central Africa. Many of the observed moves out of agriculture, as in Western Africa, have been mainly into low-productive self-employment services, mostly in urban areas (Amadou and Aronda, 2020;Busse et al, 2019). This has been driven in part by natural resource fueled urbanization into consumption cities (Gollin et al, 2016).…”

Does Premature Deindustrialisation Stall Growth? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

“…We start with a discussion of the methodology to capture the impact of ST on labour productivity. Through the Shapley decomposition, we can decompose the change in output per capita into three components: the contributions of labour productivity, the employment rate and the size of the working-age population (Busse et al, 2019; Martins, 2019; Shorrocks, 2013). For this purpose, we can begin with defining aggregate per capita value-added in terms of its components using the following identity: …”

“…This article seeks to contribute to the literature mainly in four ways. First, in the existing literature, very few studies (see Busse et al, 2019;Martins, 2019) examine the relationship between ST and economic growth by quantifying the effect of labour movement across sectors. By using Shapley decomposition on labour productivity, we are able to identify the effect of sectoral labour transition on aggregate GDP .…”