The poor performance of many African economies has been associated with low growth of exports in general and of manufacturing exports in particular. In this paper we draw on micro evidence of manufacturing firms in five African countries -Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa and Nigeria -to investigate the causes of poor exporting performance. We exploit a data set which has a much longer panel dimension than has been used before to assess the relative importance of self-selection based on efficiency and firm size as determinants of export participation. We show that firm size is a robust determinant of the decision to export. It is not a proxy for efficiency, for capital intensity, for sector or for time-invariant unobservables. In contrast the evidence for self-selection into exporting is very weak. Finally our use of a longer run panel than has been available before has allowed us to separate out the roles of ownership and skills as possible determinants of participation in exporting. We find that both foreign ownership and skills are significant determinants of exporting.

JEL classification: J31 J60 O12Keywords: Formality and informality in urban Africa Skills Unobserved market ability Wage and self-employment This paper addresses the questions as to the size and causes of earnings differentials in two urban African labor markets, those of Ghana and Tanzania. We have panel data so we can ask how far time invariant unobservables, market ability for short, matters in the determination of earnings. We also have information on whether the individual is own self-employed, self-employed with employees, a private or public sector wage employee and the size of the enterprise in which wage employees work or which the self-employed owns. We find, mirroring work on developed economies, that unobserved individual market ability is by far the most important factor explaining the variance of earnings. With controls for such ability the gap between private wage employment and civil servants is about 50%. With controls for enterprise size we find that wage employees earn the same as the self-employed in both Ghana and Tanzania. Enterprise size matters. At most half of the OLS effect of size on earnings can be explained by unobservable ability. Workers in the largest firms are the high earners with wage rates which exceed those of civil servants. These results all assume exogenous movement. We find evidence that endogeneity bias may be serious and may be understating the extent of both the size effect and the private sector wage (negative) premium. The implications of our results for understanding the nature of formal and informal employment in Africa are discussed.

The theoretical determinants of maximum sustainable government debt are investigated using Diamond's overlapping generations model. A level of debt is defined to be 'sustainable' if a steady state with nondegenerate values of economic variables exists. We show that a maximum sustainable level of debt almost always exists, and it normally occurs where variables such as capital are in the interiors, rather than at the limits, of their economically feasible ranges. This leads to a situation where, when debt is at its maximum, a further infinitesimal increase in debt causes a 'catastrophe', i.e. the economy embarks on a path of unchecked capital decumulation.

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Existing South African work on firm-level data has been limited by access to large datasets that track firms over time. This paper overcomes this by analysing a new dataset of the population of manufacturing firms that are matched to their export transactions. South African firm-level exporting is similar to the stylized facts of firm-level exporting found internationally. Moreover, heterogeneity that exists within exporting is evident. Not only do exporters differ in terms of the amount exported, but also in terms of the number of products and destinations they export too. These in turn are related to firm-level characteristics including productivity.

A robust finding in the firm-level literature is that exporting firms pay higher wages. Using South African data this paper investigates the relationship between export destination and wages at a worker level. South Africa, a middle-income country, has two distinct main export markets-a regional market where per capita incomes are lower than at home, and an international market with higher per capita incomes. Our estimates show that workers in firms that export to the region earn less than those that produce for the domestic market. Those in firms that export outside the region earn more than either domestic producers or regiononly exporters. Much of this difference in wages can be explained by the premium the different types of exporters pay for skills. These results support previous studies which suggest that export destination is related to product quality which in turn is related to worker quality and therefore wages.* Rankin (corresponding author):