The Cost of Doing Business in Africa: Evidence from Enterprise Survey Data

By Benn Eifert, A. Gelb, V. Ramachandran. 2008

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys show that indirect costs (related to infrastructure and services) account for a relatively high share of firms' costs in poor African countries and pose a competitive burden on African firms. We estimate firm-level revenue and value-added functions for six industries in 17 developing countries, demonstrating that firm performance is sensitive to the cost of indirect inputs. As indirect inputs are not usually included in estimations of value added, we argue that existing estimates understate the relative performance of African manufacturing firms.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d70ca457a43f70309801d3d0f29e9a9fbc6e56d2

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Citations in the corpus

Explaining Enterprise Performance in Developing Countries with Business Climate Survey Data (2008, unknown): “Infrastructure explains 9 percent of firm-level productivity, which is the second highest percentage after red tape, corruption, and crime in Escribano and Guasch (2005). In this careful econometric study using Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua survey data, various productivity measures are regress”
Challenges of Doing Business in Africa: A Systematic Review (2019, result): “This position is also supported by the broad literature on entrepreneurship in Africa (Asongu, 2017; Eifert et al., 2008; Tchamyou, 2017).”
The Role of Knowledge Economy in African Business (2016, background): “Eifert et al. (2008) have assessed the cost of doing business in Africa using data from 7000 firms in 17 countries for the period 2002-2003 to conclude that existing estimates undervalue the relative performance of African firms.”
Local economic development in Africa: Global context and research directions (2010, background): “It is observed that ‘African countries often lag badly on indicators of the quality of the business environment’ (Eifert et al., 2008:1533) and that Africa contains ‘most of the world’s least business-friendly regulatory environments’ (Bannock & Darroll, 2007:3).”