Abebe Shimeles

• Research Director at African Development Bank Group

Average temperature in Africa has been rising steadily from the baseline of climatology prevailing during 1951–1980. The findings in this paper suggest that real GDP growth would start declining for annual temperature higher than 0.7 °C. About 45 African countries already registered annual temperature rise above 0.7 °C in 2020 underscoring the seri...

The book has presented the views of various authors’ findings on data governance frameworks in Africa. It is a primer in creating a platform for raising awareness on basic principles/tenets of international norms on data governance. The experiences and practices shared from across the globe and Africa in particular, will effectively promote and adv...

This paper examines how inequality could be tackled through structural transformation using unit record data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for Africa. Results suggest inequality between countries tends to be higher when the share of labour employed or value-added in the agriculture sector is higher, while no association is observed...

For decades, the lack of high‐quality empirical economic research on the state of Africa's agriculture and rural economies has been an important factor impeding the formulation of evidence‐based policy on the continent. The Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces program aims to build a critical mass of early career Africa...

Malnutrition is one of the most important early life shocks that have lasting effects on health. An often neglected cause of malnutrition and hidden hunger is high food inflation, particularly in developing countries. This study uses the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey data, matching each child’s early life age in months from the time of co...

Malnutrition is one of the most important early life shocks that have lasting effects on health. An often neglected cause of malnutrition and hidden hunger is high food inflation, particularly in developing countries. This study uses the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey data, matching each child's early life age in months from the time of co...

This paper analyses the effect of the quality of governance (proxied by perceived corruption) on attitudes towards paying taxes, using the Afrobarometer surveys from thirty-six African countries over the period 2011–2015. Specifically, we find that perceived corruption in the president’s office has a significant and negative effect on reported atti...

Recently most African countries experienced a spike in their debt levels along with changes in its composition and terms. As a result, there is a growing fear of default and return of the HIPC spectre. These assessments largely rely on the traditional approach to debt sustainability that often ignores significant heterogeneity existing among Africa...

This paper analyzes the effect of the quality of governance (proxied by perceived corruption) on attitude towards paying tax. Using the Afrobarometer surveys from 36 African countries over the period 2011–2015, we find that low perception of corruption of different levels of the Executive branch (President Office, Government Officials or Tax Author...

This study revisits the role of investment in human capital in closing the productivity gap, boosting labor productivity growth, speeding the rate of structural transformation, and ultimately creating high-quality jobs in Africa. Analysis of detailed sector-level historical data on employment, value-added, and human capital shows that investment in...

A flexible labor market is a precondition for fast and efficient structural transformation—The reallocation of labor from low- to high-productivity jobs. This study uses individual-level data that span more than 15 years to analyze labor market flexibility in four of Africa’s biggest or fastest-growing economies—Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South...

This study combines evidence from interviews in seven countries with (i) government institutions responsible for attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), (ii) 102 multinationals (MNEs), and (iii) 226 domestic firms linked to these foreign affiliates as suppliers, customers, or competitors, to identify whether relations between MNEs and domestic...

This paper estimates the impact of Tunisia's tax and transfer system on inequality and poverty and assesses the benefits from public spending on education and health. Results show that Tunisia's redistributive fiscal policy reduces inequality and extreme poverty significantly. However, based on the national poverty line, the headcount ratio increas...

In this chapter, authors provide some responses to the main challenges of the agriculture sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dealing first with the acceleration of productivity through innovation and training, they consider the use of new Information and communication technology (ICT)-based services and modern technology in agriculture to cope with clim...

Agriculture remains an important source of livelihood for the majority of Africans, but the sector is still very unproductive. Despite huge agricultural potential, sub-Saharan African countries have not yet benefited from it and experienced the highest prevalence of undernourishment worldwide. As a result, countries import increasingly more agricul...

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license What are the challenges and action points for agricultural sustainability in Sub-Saharan Africa? This collection of papers offers technical analyses, policy recommendations and an overview of success stories to date. Each carefully selected paper provides valuable insights for improved policy maki...

This paper computed asset-based inequality for 38 African countries in multiple waves, using over a million household histories, to study why inequality tends to be persistently high in Africa. The results show that within-country asset inequality is positively correlated with the returns to higher education, a finding that is corroborated by resul...

Transforming Africa's Agriculture through Agro-Industrialization

From 2000 to 2014, per capita GDP in sub-Saharan Africa increased by almost 35% in real terms, doubling in some countries. Such progress has happened while agricultural productivity growth remained low in the aggregate, despite some bright spots, and poverty reduction has been steady but discouragingly slow. This paper argues that ending extreme po...

Using a high-frequency local market price data from Ethiopia, we estimate the effects of exposure to food price inflation during “early life”—inception to the first 24 months after birth—on children’s health. Our analysis focuses on three major staple cereals. The results show that exposure to food price inflation while in utero and during infancy...

We analyze data from a randomized controlled trial of two innovative anti-tax evasion schemes in Ethiopia that signal threats of audit and complimentary messages that encourage tax morale. Our results indicate that the threat of audit reduces tax evasion significantly, and its effect is higher in businesses commonly suspected of high tax evasion ra...

Based on the 2009 National Baseline Household Survey (NBHS), the objective of the paper is to analyse the education sector in South Sudan and to highlight its key role in reducing poverty and inequality in the country. The first estimation highlights the role of educational attainment on the risk of poverty based on a Probit model with marginal eff...

While it is possible for economies to grow based on abundant land or natural resources, more often structural change—the shift of resources from low-productivity to high-productivity sectors—is the key driver of economic growth. Structural transformation is vital for Africa. The region’s much-lauded growth turnaround since 1995 has been the result...

While it is possible for economies to grow based on abundant land or natural resources, more often structural change—the shift of resources from low-productivity to high-productivity sectors—is the key driver of economic growth. Structural transformation is vital for Africa. The region’s much-lauded growth turnaround since 1995 has been the result...

Developing countries often face two well-known structural problems: high youth unemployment and high inequality. In recent decades, policymakers have increased the share of government spending on education in developing countries to address both of these issues. The empirical literature offers mixed results on which type of education is most suitab...

Africa is rising. Since 1995 it has grown faster than many other parts of the developing world. Per capita income has been increasing steadily, and with six of the world's ten fastest- growing economies of the last de cade, Africa has been branded the developing world's next "frontier market" by Wall Street and the World Bank. Yet Africa's experien...

Growth in Africa is weakly linked to poverty reduction. The reason is that Africa has failed to create enough good jobs. Structural transformation-the relative growth of employment in high productivity sectors-has not featured in Africa's post-1995 growth story. As a result, the region's fastest growing economies have the least responsiveness of em...

The impact of development aid on employment in Africa is investigated using a set of projects implemented by the African Development Bank (AfDB) in the last 20 years. The results indicate a heterogeneous effect of aid. Projects directed at productive sectors, mainly those that focus on financing small-scale enterprises and microcredit institutions,...

This paper presents evidence on the making of the middle class in Africa by exploiting a comparable micro data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for thirty-seven countries over two decades consisting of over seven hundred thousand household histories. We constructed a pseudo-panel to examine the dynamics of middle class in blocks of fou...

Governments in developing countries are typically constrained by a limited fiscal capacity to finance the provision of essential public goods – a constraint that has been cited as one of the fundamental challenges to economic development. Several developing countries have recently implemented electronic tax systems (ETS) to improve monitoring tax c...

Limited fiscal capacity poses a significant challenge in developing countries. To mitigate this challenge, the adoption of electronic tax systems has been at the forefront of tax reforms; however, there is little systematic empirical evidence on the impact of such reforms. We attempt to narrow this gap by documenting evidence from Ethiopia where th...

African countries have achieved impressive growth performance during the recent years despite the multiple crises the western world is experiencing. However, this growth has not been inclusive for several reasons. It has been driven mainly by the extractive industry at the detriment of the industrial and manufacturing sectors. These sectors contrib...

This paper analyzes welfare implications of rising commodity prices in Ethiopia based on household budget surveys. Our findings suggest that a rise in relative prices of such necessities as cereals would lead to a large deterioration in the welfare of households in urban areas. In rural areas generally land-rich households tend to benefit significa...

An analysis of panel data on individuals in a random selection of urban households in Ethiopia reveals large, sustained, and unexplained earnings gaps between public and private and formal and informal sectors over 1994–2004. At the same time, we find, first, that the rate of mobility increased in the two pairs of sectors. Sample transitions rates...

This paper uses data from the International Comparison Program 2005 to recover complete own and cross-price and income elasticity estimates for the African continent using the Extended Linear Expenditure System for 12 broadly defined commodities. The results can be used for aggregate welfare comparison in such global models as GTAP (Global Trade An...

Community-based health insurance schemes (Mutuelles) in Rwanda are one of the largest experiments in community based risk-sharing mechanisms in SubSaharan Africa for health related problems. This study examines the impact of the program on demand for modern health care, mitigation of out-ofpocket catastrophic health expenditure and social inclusive...

This study explores the role of development assistance to finance the required growth to reduce extreme poverty by half in 2015 in Africa. The study utilizes the financing gap and “optimal†aid allocation models to explore the implications of efficient aid utilization and global-aid allocation on total aid required to meet goal 1 of the MDGs. Th...

Community-based health insurance schemes (Mutuelles) in Rwanda are one of the largest experiments in community based risk-sharing mechanisms in Sub-Saharan Africa for health related problems. This study examines the impact of the program on demand for modern health care, mitigation of out-of-pocket catastrophic health expenditure and social inclusi...

The paper examines the pattern of poverty, growth and inequality in Ethiopia in the recent decade. The result shows that growth, to a large extent depends on structural factors such as initial conditions, vagaries of nature, external shocks and peace and stability both in Ethiopia and in the region. Using a rich household panel data, the paper also...

This study analyzes the persistence of poverty in both rural and urban areas in Ethiopia during 1994–2004. The key finding is that households move frequently in and out of poverty but the difficulty of exiting from poverty, like the chance of avoiding slipping back, increases with the time spent in that state and varies considerably between male- a...

The year 1992 marked a policy watershed in the Ethiopian financial sector, as well as the country’s economic policy at large. This was the period where a shift from a controlled to market-friendly policy regime was made. The new government continued with the policy of state ownership of major financial institutions, with major reforms such as opera...

This paper investigates dynamics of poverty in urban Ethiopia using both subjective and objective definitions of poverty. The two sets of estimates of persistence and recurrence of poverty are similar, suggesting that consumption-based mobility estimates are not seriously distorted by measurement error.

An analysis of panel data on individuals in a random selection of urban households in Ethiopia reveals large, sustained, and unexplained earnings gaps between public and private, and formal and informal sectors over the period 1994-2004. The authors have no formal evidence whetherthese gaps reflect segmentation of the labor market along either of t...

This article uses simulations to explore the possibility of halving the number of people in Africa living in extreme poverty by 2015. It shows that initial levels of inequality and per capita consumption determine the cumulative growth and reductions in inequality required to achieve this target, and finds that on average Africa needs only a relati...

This paper focuses on the persistency of poverty in rural and urban households in Ethiopia by estimating dynamic probit models. Unobserved heterogeneity, first order state dependence and serially correlated error component are allowed for. The empirical results for both rural and urban areas show that each of these components is statistically signi...

In this paper, using the rich household panel data of urban and rural Ethiopia that covers the period from 1994 to 2000, we attempted to establish the link between finance and poverty in Ethiopia. Our results show that access to finance is an important factor in consumption smoothing and hence poverty reduction. We also found evidence for a poverty...

The InterRegional Inequality Facility Secretariat: Overseas Development Institute 111 Westminster Bridge Road London SE1 7JD UK ii This study was sponsored by the InterRegional Inequality Facility. The Facility exists to promote interregional dialogue and knowledge sharing on the issue of inequality – how it affects development, and how it can be a...

In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of inclusive growth, the existence of income mobility over a lon...

This paper addresses issues related to the dynamics of income poverty using unique household panel data for urban and rural areas of Ethiopia covering the period 1994-97. The percentage of households that remained in poverty was twice as large in urban areas as in rural areas. This suggests that income variability is a serious problem in rural area...

This article reviews sixty years of the activity of the World Bank, by stressing the variations over time of its attitude with regard to the fight against poverty. Indeed, during the 1950s and 1960s, the World Bank considered that the best means of fighting poverty consisted in creating the conditions of the fastest possible growth by carrying out...

The paper investigates the impact of growth on poverty in Ethiopia by analysing panel data covering 1994–97, a period of economic recovery driven by peace, good weather, and much improved macroeconomic management. The analysis of poverty shows land ownership, education, type of crops planted, occupations in urban areas, dependency ratios, and locat...

This paper focuses on the persistency of poverty in rural and urban households in Ethiopia by estimating dynamic probit models. Unobserved heterogeneity, first order state dependence and serially correlated error component are allowed for The dynamic probit model of poverty that controlled for household heterogeneity and serial correlation performe...

Based on a rural and urban data set from Ethiopia, exiting from or re-entering poverty were found to depend on the time spent in or out of poverty. In comparison to urban areas, exiting rural poverty was easier than re-entering it. However, exiting poverty was extremely difficult the longer households were in that state, even more in urban than rur...

The end of apartheid in 1994 ushered in a new era in South Africa and with it came the challenge of building a democratic, inclusive and stable society. The government led by the African National Congress initially followed a neoliberal stance to manage the economy and a redistributive strategy to close the income disparity with a streak of a devel...

This paper documents the pattern, trend and determinants of migration in Africa using rich cross-country migration matrix data and household surveys from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. Results show that despite increase in the absolute number of migrants, Africa, particularly SubSaharan Africa has one of the lowest rate of migration in t...

This paper uses data from the International Comparison Program 2005 to recover income and price elasticity estimates for the African continent using the Extended Linear Expenditure System for 13 broadly defined commodities. The results can be used for aggregate welfare comparison in such global models as GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) and exe...

Added t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborgs Universitet, 2006.

Added t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborg University, 2006. Includes bibliographical references.