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Corruption was ranked among the top five biggest obstacles affecting the operation of enterprises in Africa and was rated as a severe obstacle by close to 40 percent of firms in the sample. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corruption and firm level productivity.

This paper uses the Enterprise Survey Data Set of the World Bank and employs an instrumental variable (IV) approach to deal with the potential endogeneity of corruption in a productivity equation. The authors use industry-country averages of the bribe tax and time tax as well as a dummy of female ownership as IVs.

Using three different measures of corruption, the authors find evidence that corruption “sands the wheels of commerce” and hence dampens firm-level productivity even when the endogeneity of corruption is controlled for. The authors find no evidence to support the trade-off between bribe payments and the red tape suggesting that government officials deliberately use bureaucracy as a mechanism of trapping the most productive firms that can afford to pay higher bribes. Hence this study lends no support to the “greasing” hypothesis.

The results thus suggest that in the second best choice environment firms are still not better off paying bribes rather mitigating corruption could be ideal. Therefore alongside existing regulatory corruption mitigants in the respective African countries, the paper suggests that government through public information dissemination ought to enlighten firms that corruption is not productivity enhancing. Thus firms are better-off evading corruption tendencies than propagating them.

The contribution to empirical literature is that much of the empirical studies have overly concentrated on Europe and Asia and with very limited evidence available for African countries. Therefore in terms of extending the work of McAuthar and Teal (2002) and Fisman and Svensson (2007), the authors argue that by using a new data set stretching from 2006 to as recent as 2017 the paper is rightly placed to make an empirical contribution about the relationship between corruption and firm-level productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate both direct and indirect channels through which imported inputs spur exporting in the African manufacturing sector.

The authors estimated models for all exporters, direct exporters and indirect exporters using a probit model. The authors circumvented the endogeneity of imported inputs and productivity in the export status models by using their lagged values. The authors employed the World Bank Enterprise Survey data for a set of 26 African countries.

From the direct channel, the authors find that importers of inputs in the previous period increase the probability of exporting in the current period pointing to the possibility of sunk cost complementarities. Indirectly, high lagged firm productivity spurs exporting in the current period. Being a direct importer of inputs in the previous period increases the probability of exporting directly but has no effect on indirect exporters. Both channels are complimentary because their interaction term is positive and significant.

The importation of inputs seems a precondition for exporting and that any policy obscuring imports may indirectly inhibit exportation. Government policy should make importation inputs easier in order to stimulate exporting activities.

The paper’s contribution to empirical literature is that much of the empirical studies have overly concentrated on developed countries and hence leaving a huge knowledge gap for African countries. The only papers focusing on Africa are by Parra and Martínez-Zarzoso (2015), who focused on the Egyptian manufacturing sector, and Edwards et al. (2017), who used firm-level data from South Africa. The authors extend this literature by undertaking firm-level analysis in a cross-country setting among manufacturing firms in Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of bank specific factors on interest rate in banking financial institutions (BFIs) of Uganda.

To analyze the effect, an OLS random effects regression estimate on a data set of 24 banks from 2008 to 2016 from Bank of Uganda Depository Corporation survey was carried out. Studied bank specific factors including liquidity, operational efficiency, credit risk, capitalization and lending ratio are considered.

The results indicate that liquidity, operational efficiency, capitalization and lending out ratio affect the interest rate while credit risk does not.

The study has confirmed that bank specific factors influence interest rate and other factors such as industry-level and indirect macroeconomic indicators need to be explored. The differences in categories of banks on interest rate would be of importance. Finally, this study concentrated on banks in Uganda, future study would focus on the comparison of Ugandan banks with those of other countries in the East African Region.

Bank managers should invest in up-to-date technology to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency. Managers of bank should take interest on equity mobilization, because it constitutes a cheaper source of capital to finance asset used in operations and long-term needs of borrowers financing. Government should consider a legislation that provides incentives toward savings and reduction in tax for bank inputs.

This is the first study that investigates the effect of bank specific factors on interest rate in Uganda’s BFIs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of interest rate in emerging markets, focusing on banking financial institutions in Uganda.

Using the net interest margin model, interest rate was estimated by applying a panel random effects regression method on 24 banks, while controlling for bank-specific factors, industry and macroeconomic indicators. Data were drawn from annual reports provided by Bank of Uganda Depository Corporation survey from 2008 to 2016.

The results indicate that liquidity, equity capital, market power and reserve requirement have a positive effect on interest rate. The study further finds that operational efficiency, lending out ratio, concentration, public sector borrowing and private sector credit have a negative effect on interest rate. However, credit risk does not influence interest rate.

Studied banks are grouped in one panel data set; future studies would focus on the differences in banks and establish how these differences affect interest rate. Future study would also focus on how the determinants of interest rate in Uganda are compared with those of other banks in other emerging market countries.

Bank managers need to take interest in equity mobilization because it is a reliable and cheaper source of funding bank operations. Banks should emphasize efficient operations to reduce on the cost of doing business. Government should utilize funds borrowed from banks in efficient ways to improve economic growth. The central bank should minimize the use of reserve requirement as a means of controlling money in circulation.

This is the first paper that uses annual report data from several banks and periods to investigate the determinants of interest rate in an emerging country.

The World Bank (2017) ranks poor infrastructure, particularly electricity, as the second topmost obstacle (after access to finance) affecting enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of infrastructure quality on firm productivity in Africa.

The author used the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) for 26 African countries and employed both descriptive and ordinary least squares techniques during the analysis. The author circumvents the endogeneity of infrastructure in the productivity model by using firm-level measures of infrastructure quality rather than the stock of infrastructural capital.

On an average, 80 percent of manufacturing firms in Africa reported having experienced electricity outages in the financial year preceding the survey. Power outages are negatively associated with the productivity of small, medium, young, domestically owned firms and non-exporters. On the other hand, the author observes a substitution effect of generators for the unreliable power from the public grid and this effect positively influences the productivity of large, old, foreign-owned and exporting firms.

The author argues that in addition to infrastructure capital at an aggregate level, dealing with quality issues at firm level is required to enhance productivity. More attention needs to be put to the elimination of power outages so as to improve the productivity of all firms particularly those that cannot afford to use generators in the place of electricity from the public grid.

The author notes that there exists scanty empirical literature on the effect of infrastructure quality on productivity for the case of Africa despite the existence of WBES for at least two waves for both developed and developing countries. The uniqueness of this paper in comparison to the previous literature is that the author undertakes the analysis according to some important firm categories: size, age, ownership and export status. Additionally, the author uses the infrastructure quality to understand its effect on firm-level efficiency levels rather than the stock of infrastructural capital. The use of aggregate indicators of infrastructure introduces an endogeneity problem which the author circumvents in this study.

This paper aims to investigate firm‐level interactions between productivity and exporting in Uganda's manufacturing sector.

The paper empirically tested two hypotheses that relate to the dynamic gains from trade and also have tended to dominate the literature; self‐selection and learning‐by‐exporting hypotheses. It employs proxies of self‐selection and learning‐by‐exporting obtained from indices of path dependence to fit maximum likelihood estimates of export behavior.

The results provide support for both hypotheses and it is also found that more experienced exporters reap more productivity gains from learning effects which is in line with the view that knowledge spillovers to exporting firms increase with the level of interaction in the global market place. Thus, learning‐by‐exporting is not a “short term” occurrence which takes place only in the first few years of entry in export markets after which it would fizzle out as a firm's exporting experience increases but rather, it is a cumulative process.

This paper generates a number of insights that can guide policy makers in designing policies to promote firm productivity growth that is an engine of growth in the private sector and by extension, would fuel up overall economic growth and poverty reduction.

Previous studies on exports and growth in Uganda have been basically focused on macro‐data analysis; yet, promoting rapid expansion of manufactured exports may require more than just a good macroeconomic policy environment. This study fills the research gap by relating firm‐level productivity performance to the microeconomic environment in which manufacturing firms operate.

The debate concerning the relationship between maternal education and child nutritional status is not a foregone conclusion. This paper aims to contribute to the existing debate by examining this relationship for the case of Uganda.

Theoretically, the study was based on household models of optimization, just like in the standard consumer theory, to gain insights into household demand for the health good. Empirically, the paper employed maximum-likelihood probit models and computed marginal effects in order to obtain logically interpretable results.

The paper finds that once the socio-economic factors are controlled for, the significance of maternal education, especially primary and secondary levels, in influencing child nutrition status decays but post-secondary education persists. Therefore, if mothers are exposed to the same socio-economic conditions, it is education of the mother beyond secondary level that generates a difference in the child nutrition outcomes.

These findings suggest that efforts to improve the child health outcomes in the future need to target measures that aim to educate women beyond secondary level. The government program to extend free education at the secondary level is a good start and should be strengthened.

Literature presents no consensus on the effect of maternal education and child nutritional status. It is often argued that maternal education is simply a proxy for the socio-economic conditions and geographical area of residence such its significance decays once these are controlled for. Yet others argue that maternal education is a single most important factor influencing child nutritional outcomes. The debate is still very hot and this study sought to contribute to this debate for the case of Uganda.

The purpose of this editorial is to provide a quick glance at the dominant issues that have characterized the developing economics debate during the past five decades. It seeks to offer a backdrop for the papers in the present volume of AJEMS.

It is based on a review of a selection of literature that highlights the dominant perspectives in development economics.

It draws a distinction between soft and hard economics, arguing that economic growth must be converted into social change that benefits poor for it to be described as development-oriented.

It provides a direction for future research into issues of economic growth and poverty alleviation in Sub-Sahara Africa.