Economic Geography and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

By E. M. Bosker, H. Garretsen. Social Science Research Network, 2012

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) physical geography is often blamed for its poor economic performance. A country's geographical location does, however, not only determine its agricultural conditions or disease environment. It also pins down a country's relative position vis-a-vis other countries, affecting its ease of access to foreign markets. This paper assesses the importance of market access for manufactures in explaining the observed income differences between SSA countries over the period 1993-2009. We construct yearly, theory-based measures of each SSA country's market access using the information contained in bilateral manufacturing trade flows. Using these measures, we find a robust positive effect of market access on economic development that has increased in importance during the last decade. Interestingly, when further unraveling this finding, access to other SSA markets in particular turns out to be important. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25a33471f25b085563c054471b9015237ecc6ed0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. C. Berg
2. Jean-François Maystadt
3. Luca Marchiori
4. Yishen Liu
5. Uwe Deichmann
6. Ingmar Schumacher
7. H. Selod

In Political Science and International Relations

1. C. Berg
2. Jean-François Maystadt
3. Yishen Liu
4. Uwe Deichmann
5. H. Selod

Citations in the corpus

• The Impact of Weather Anomalies on Migration in sub-Saharan Africa (2012, background): “It is unfortunately not possible to proceed to the Redding and Venables (2004) estimation of the real market potential on the investigated period, given the lack of bilateral trade data availability before 1993 (Bosker and Garretsen, 2008).”
• Transport Policies and Development (2015, background): “In another regional study on sub-Saharan Africa, it was estimated that a 1 per cent increase in a country’s market access is associated with a 0.03 per cent increase in its GDP per capita (Bosker & Garretsen, 2012).”