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Showing all content in Trade
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Project
Misallocation or mismeasurement? Collecting new panel data to improve production function estimation
SMEs tend to show substantial differences in productivity even within narrow industries and geographical regions. In order to design effective industrial policies, it is important to quantify such differences in the productivity of SMEs, identify what constraints drive these differences, and to understand what are the benefits of reducing them through external policy...
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Event
Coping with shocks: Resilience in Ethiopia’s ready-made garment industry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgbI7uYm3n8&t=3s Ethiopia’s industrial exports depend on the ready-made garment industry mostly located in industrial parks. In addition to the pandemic, factories in Ethiopia faced another shock related to the conflict in the northern parts of the country and the resulting removal of Ethiopia from the free trade privileges provided by...
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Project
Reducing comparison frictions in the Ugandan credit market
Many first-time borrowers tend to find out about loans exclusively from providers — unaware of the total cost. Financial institutions obscure prices especially for new and naive consumers to maximise profits (Atuhumuza et al. 2020), preventing many consumers from making well-informed borrowing decisions. Therefore, credit markets are characterised by substantial price...
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Publication - Policy Brief
Trading up: Harnessing the AfCFTA for growth in Uganda
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) presents a promising offer of continent-wide market access for Uganda. However, these gains are not guaranteed, and the benefits of the AfCFTA also come with increased competition for Uganda’s exports. Using a sample of large geographically dispersed African countries, our modelling estimates a net reduction in...
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Project
Pilots on nano commodity exchanges
Firms operating in environments with erratic supplies of agricultural commodities face high implicit transaction costs in operations. Ghana opened the first full-service commodity exchange in West Africa in late 2018. We have begun to look into the impact of the Ghana Commodity Exchange (GCX) on farmers, traders, and firms in the agricultural marketing ecosystem. In...
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Blog post
Trade, informality, and corruption: Evidence from small-scale traders in Kenya
The COVID-19 pandemic has induced vast trade disruptions that have stunted firms’ sales, profits, and growth, particularly for small-scale traders. While many formal borders closed, small-scale traders crossing official borders must increasingly rely on informal border crossings to make a living. In Kenya, we surveyed small-scale traders to analyse their cross-border...
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Publication - Project Report
As multilateralism ebbs, preferential trade agreements are on the rise
Early proponents of FTAs/PTAs were of the view that they could somewhat circuitously support the cause of multilateralism that was then and now seen as the first best approach to trade liberalization and the one that minimizes the risk of trade diversion. That optimism has faded. The Pakistan Business Council (PBC) has requested IGC-Pakistan to support a study on a...
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Event
Economic Growth Forum: Economic resilience, recovery and resurgent growth in Uganda
The Ministry of Finance, Planning & Economic Development, in partnership with IGC Uganda, organises the Economic Growth Forum - a high-level conference on Uganda’s economy held regularly since 2017. The conference provides an opportunity to discuss key growth challenges, learn from policy experiences in other countries, and identify a course of actions to drive...
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Project
Measuring Rwanda's import and export of education and health services
International trade in services is increasing over the years. In Rwanda, one of the two service categories that are traded (both import and export) are health and education. For health, some Rwandan residents who need special medical treatment travel abroad to seek medical attention from specialists, while patients from some neighbouring countries come for medical treatment...
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Project
Informal clustering, firm growth, and the impact of the COVID-19 shock
In Kampala, firms are heavily concentrated in the Central Business District (CBD), where they operate next to one another in high-density, informal clusters (UBOS 2011). Manufacturing firms operating in these clusters are smaller than in terms of number of employees and do not grow over time. Demand shocks that arise from COVID-19 are likely to be more severe in denser...