Monitoring of structural change in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) requires examination of the changes in their structural economic vulnerability. This cannot be done by comparing the level of the Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI) that is calculated for each triennial review of the list of LDCs, because of the change in the design of the index. In this paper, the change in the structural vulnerability of LDCs is assessed according to two retrospective series of EVI, based on constant definitions, those respectively used at the 2006 and 2012 reviews. The real change in structural economic vulnerability is thus isolated from the impact of the changes in the design of the index (components, weighting, methods of calculation, and data updating).
During the last decades, international connectivity has improved significantly with the worldwide deployment of some 400 fiber submarine cables (SMCs), transmitting more than 99% of international telecommunications. If sub-Saharan African (SSA) has long remained excluded from this interconnection process, the maritime infrastructure network has recently densified and spurred African connectivity catch-up. This paper estimates the impact of SMC deployment on the digital divide in an original sample of 49 SSA countries covering the period 1990-2014. Diff-in-diff (DID) estimations are conducted and highlight the particular contribution of SEACOM and EASSy cables, laid in 2009-2010, to Internet penetration in Eastern and Southern Africa. According to DID estimates these SMCs rollout has yielded a 3-5 percentage-point increase in internet penetration rates in this region compared to the rest of the continent. Tripledifference estimations emphasize conditional factors under which these cables have fostered Internet uptake: enlarged Internet bandwidth per users, lower broadband Internet tariffs, higher investment in the mobile network, improved terrestrial connectivity, and electricity access.
Modern customs administrations aim to both facilitate legal trade and combat fraud. To meet this dual objective, many customs administrations in developing countries must give risk management a highly prominent role. In this context of modernization, this article first provides stylized facts on the performance of the customs controls carried out at the Gabon border. Then, we compare Gabon's granular import customs data with international trade statistics. Based on this comparison, we identify undetected fraud and develop a methodology to target ex post audits. Finally, we define indicators to monitor the performance of customs valuation controls. To improve their performance, we show that customs in developing countries should rely more on data analytics, notably via the implementation of simple statistical tools and the diversification of their sources of information..
For at least 40 years, the analysis of the causes and consequences of macroeconomic instability has greatly deepened our understanding of the handicaps faced by developing countries. This concern on economic instability is evidenced by a broad spectrum of indicators, based on the deviation of observed values of a given economic aggregate from its reference or trend value. In general, the choice of this or that indicator is not discussed advocating that the resulting instability indicators are closely correlated. Focusing on measurements of instability in export revenue data for 134 countries from 1970 to 2005, this paper finds that this assertion may be true for variancebased indicators, measuring the average magnitude of deviations from the trend. However, great discrepancies may arise between different measures of the asymmetry or of the occurrence of extreme deviations around the trend when different trend computation methods are used. Our purpose is, therefore, to invite further discussions regarding the use of these indicators, and to highlight the different dimensions of instability, which have been so far unheeded by the economic literature.
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