The Structural Change in Sub-Saharan African Countries
Open Access
Author:
He, Zhiyi
Area of Honors:
Statistics
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Aleksandra B Slavkovic, Thesis Supervisor David Russell Hunter, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
structural change Africa employment share labor productivity
Abstract:
We replicate the statistical analyses of Diao, Harttgen and McMillan (2017) on the
changing structure of Africa’s economies, and extend them by adding most recent data from the
World Bank. Due to lack of information provided in the original paper, we are unable to replicate part of the analyses and furthermore we find what appear to be major flaws in their linear regression results. On the other hand, consistent with some of the original paper’s findings, we show that the decline in the employment share in agriculture continues. This decline is most pronounced for rural females. We also show that although the trend of the employment share follows the pattern observed in the rest of the world, its value-added differs. This difference suggests premature deindustrialization of high-income African countries.
