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Between 1996 and 2014, 30 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries benefited from debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). The architects of the HIPC initiative and MDRI posited that these programs would spur growth and investment. This paper exploits the variability of participation in the HIPC initiative and MDRI across time and country, in order to identity the effect of participation on growth and investment. I find that the decision point and post-completion point periods of the enhanced HIPC initiative are associated with a 1.762 percentage point and 3.139 percentage point increase in public investment, respectively. The impact is higher in countries with low access to international capital markets. The enhanced HIPC initiative increases private investment by 1.838 percentage points during the post-completion point period in countries with low access to international capital, for approximately two years, but has no effect on growth or foreign direct investment. I find no effect of the original HIPC initiative or MDRI on growth, private investment, public investment or foreign direct investment. I find no heterogeneous impact of the enhanced HIPC initiative on growth and foreign direct investment by level of indebtedness, access to international capital markets, or institutional quality. As the measures of institutional quality have barely changed between 1996 and 2014 in HIPC countries, the results of this paper suggest that without a strong improvement in institutional quality, debt relief is unlikely to boost investment and growth in Africa. Possible future debt relief in SSA countries should be associated with a component directly aimed at improving institutional quality. If an improvement of institutional quality is not feasible in the short run, debt relief in SSA countries should aim to support public investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the driving factors of manufacturing development in Africa. Using the system-GMM technique with four-year average panel data over the period 1995–2014, including 53 African countries, the paper finds four main results. (1) There is a U-shaped relationship between the manufacturing share of GDP and per capita GDP. (2) Exchange rate depreciation stimulates Africa’s manufacturing sector. (3) Good governance, especially a low level of corruption and better government effectiveness contribute to Africa’s manufacturing development. (4) The size of domestic market positively affects the manufacturing share of GDP. On the other hand, the paper finds no significant effects of FDI and urbanization on manufacturing development. The implication of these findings is that improving the level of competitiveness, expanding the size of domestic market, combating corruption as well as improving government effectiveness are key for Africa’s manufacturing sector development. Moreover, the U-shaped relationship between the manufacturing share of GDP and per capita GDP, implies that African countries should not expect industrialization to automatically happen with income increase, but rather, they should proactively tackle key obstacles to the development of the manufacturing sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper explores the challenges for analysis of urbanization which can arise from insufficiently rigorous definition of what is “urban”. Policy makers and investors still use the ideas of “rural” versus “urban” and increasingly assume that the pace of urbanization in African countries is a measure of positive economic structural change. However most urban definitions do not incorporate economic characteristics. In Africa widely differing urban population thresholds and administrative factors are the most common criteria. The thresholds are often so low that many rural settlements are also defined as “urban” or they may be included on population density criteria, meaning the apparent pace of urbanization is inflated unrealistically. These issues are exemplified in this paper through detailed examples drawn from Kenya. It uses a range of sources including official census data and urban data published by Africapolis, as well as aerial images of rural and urban settlements in Kenya. It demonstrates how the use of population density criteria has inflated Kenyan urban data by the incorporation of very large numbers of rural people and explains how this can lead to entirely misleading interpretations of local and national urban and migration trends. Errors in urban figures can therefore have serious policy implications. It is argued that such errors can be reduced by not relying on a single criterion to define “urban” or by triangulating data on rural and urban settlements with other relevant information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Cash transfers increase farm production by 33.5 percent. • None of these impacts are channelled through transfer-induced changes in farm labour. • In fact, cash transfers have no significant impact on family labour supply or on demand for hired labour. • This implies that the productive impacts of cash transfers flow through other channels, different from the labour one. Abstract This paper has the double aim to study whether unconditional cash transfers have an impact on farm production and to look into the causal mechanisms through which government transfers produce productive impacts. We use mediation analysis to identify the total effect of transfers on farm production and to isolate the influence of the labour channel from other transmission channels. In particular, we analyze whether changes in farm production are caused by transfer-induced changes in the use of farm labour – either by reallocating family labour between off- and on-farm work or by changes in the demand for hired labour – or if other transmission channels are at work. We find that cash transfers have a sizable impact on farm production but they do not lead to increased use of family or hired labour on the farm, which implies that the productive impacts of cash transfers flow through other channels, different from the labour one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Identifying and selecting poor households with efficient targeting methods is essential for effective poverty alleviation programs. This paper assesses the ex-post performance of two popular targeting mechanisms, Proxy Means Testing (PMT) and Community-Based Targeting (CBT), in a pilot cash transfer program in Cameroon. Several indicators and metrics to measure each method’s performance in terms of inclusion of poor households and exclusion of non-poor households are employed. Results consistently show that CBT performs poorly in terms of selecting households with low per capita consumption when compared to PMT. CBT appears to select households with low physical and human capital, regardless of actual consumption level. However, CBT also shows more variability in the selection decision than PMT even when alternative poverty definitions are used as robustness tests. The PMT method used in the pilot slightly outperforms other targeting methods (hybrid, alternative PMT, and universal targeting with equal budget), but errors remain high when selecting 35% of the population for program participation. The results suggest caution is needed in employing CBT methods to select households with low per capita consumption in an environment where poverty levels are high and administrative capacities are limited. CBT performance may be improved through more uniform and consistent guidance on program selection criteria and process, including explicit criteria that enable CBT monitoring, as well as a better integration between PMT and CBT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper discusses South–South cooperation by examining ProSAVANA, a flagship agricultural development program seeking to apply Brazilian experience to Mozambique. ProSAVANA is a joint Japan–Brazil–Mozambique initiative in the savannah zone of Mozambique’s Nacala Corridor region that was initially inspired by the Japan–Brazil PRODECER program in Brazil’s Cerrado region. ProSAVANA subsequently became the focus of fears about land-grabbing in the Nacala Corridor, attracting strong civil society contestation. We show how distinct imaginaries of agricultural development in Mozambique and Brazil were used to mobilize for and against ProSAVANA, thus revealing the contentious nature of the similarity claims underpinning South–South cooperation. In particular, we focus on the role of landscape imaginaries associated with the savannah and the Cerrado. We examine the use in the promotion and contestation of ProSAVANA of visual representations that draw on these imaginaries, including GIS maps of Mozambique’s savannah region made by Brazilian agribusiness consultants and an advocacy video of Brazil’s Cerrado region filmed by Mozambican land rights activists. Noting that the latest ProSAVANA planning documents differ significantly from those expressing its initial vision, we argue that the contestation of ProSAVANA has had a series of productive effects even before the program has moved to full implementation. These productive effects are visible not only in the program itself but also in the wider context of state-society relations shaping debates on South–South cooperation in Mozambique, Brazil, and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Assorting on gender is casually observed in developing countries and is now systematically built into many group-oriented development interventions. In this paper we explore the mechanisms underlying the emergent gender assorting, using an experiment in which African villagers could form groups to share risk. We exogenously varied the extent to which grouping arrangements were enforced and, hence, the importance of trust and social enforcement as supports for group formation. Gender assorting was significant and considerable when grouping was perfectly enforced or depended on social enforcement. There was significantly less gender assorting when grouping depended on trust. Exploratory analysis suggests that this reduction in gender assorting may be owing to family ties and co-memberships in gender-mixed religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper examines how farmers in a developing country search for information. Using data on farmers’ decisions to connect with other farmers in order to ask for information about different agricultural problems, we explore the role played by identity in accessing information. We show that farmers target different subsets of acquaintances when searching for different types of information, supporting the view that identity cannot be the main determinant of such decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Economic regulation is being introduced into the water services sector in developing economies, where widespread poverty and service inadequacies affect regulatory rationales. This paper analyzes the regulatory experience in 11 metropolitan areas with respect to the challenge of reaching all urban consumers, particularly the poor. Case study evidence suggests that pro-poor regulatory outcomes have been constrained by inadequate framework conditions and a limited understanding of alternative providers. In many cases regulatory governance has been equally vulnerable, although some regulators have demonstrated a capacity and willingness to achieve a balance between the social and financial objectives of water service regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Global retail companies (“supermarkets”) have an increasing influence on developing countries, through foreign investments and/or through the imposition of their private standards. The impact on developing countries and poverty is often assessed as negative. In this paper we show the opposite, based on an analysis of primary data collected to measure the impact of supermarkets on small contract farmers in Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world. Almost 10,000 farmers in the Highlands of Madagascar produce vegetables for supermarkets in Europe. In this global supply chain, small farmers’ micro-contracts are combined with intensive farm assistance and supervision programs to fulfill complex quality requirements and phyto-sanitary standards of supermarkets. Small farmers that participate in these contracts have higher welfare, more income stability and shorter lean periods. We also find significant effects on improved technology adoption, better resource management and spillovers on the productivity of the staple crop rice. The small but emerging modern retail sector in Madagascar does not (yet) deliver these benefits as they do not (yet) request the same high standards for their supplies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]