Access to finance has been considered to be one of the important factors in influencing firms’ real activities and in promoting aggregates. However, literature on the relationship between finance and firm-level productivity is almost non-existent for African countries. This paper fills this gap by using cross-sectional firm-level data to estimate the effect of access to finance on labour productivity, total factor productivity (TFP), and the stochastic frontier trans-log model. This study also estimates an instrumental variable model – two-stage least square estimator to address potential endogeneity bias between access to credit and firms’ productivity. The results obtained show that the lack of access to finance, especially overdraft facilities negatively affects the productivity of firms in Africa. Also, smaller firms and sole-proprietorships are mostly affected because they have less access to finance. This study suggests that the development of a balanced financial system should be of topmost priority to policy makers. This ensures that more finance is channelled towards those firms whose productivity depends heavily on the availability of finance irrespective of their characteristics. This would result in firms increasing their investments in productivity-enhancing activities, which would benefit long-term economic growth.
Publications
March 11, 2018
Finance and Firm Productivity in Africa: Background Study from World Bank Enterprise Survey Data
Access to finance has been considered to be one of the important factors in influencing firms’ real activities and in promoting aggregates. However, literature on the relationship between finance and firm-level productivity is almost non-existent for African countries. This paper fills this gap by using cross-sectional firm-level data to estimate the effect of access to […]
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Nigeria Economic Update (Issue 25)
Crude oil price continued to increase in the
period under review, reaching its 2016 peak at $50.30 on June 2, 2016.
Specifically, OPEC weekly basket price increased by 1.43 percent from $44.65 on
May 27, 2016 to $45.29 on June 3, 2016. Brent was sold for $49.96
on June 3, 2016. The present rise in crude oil price can be
attributed to oil production shocks in several oil-exporting countries, and the
general expectation of a further cut in output following the OPEC meeting in
Vienna on June 2, 2016. However, the OPEC meeting ended with no agreement on
production quotas. In Nigeria, oil production level increased in the period
under review, following repairs on some of the damaged oil and gas facilities. Precisely,
Nigerias output increased by 200,000 barrels on June 3, 2016 to 1.6 million
barrels.