Understanding why so many people across the world are so poor is one of the central intellectual challenges of our time. This book provides the tools and data that will enable students, researchers and professionals to address that issue. Empirical Development Economics has been designed as a hands-on teaching tool to investigate the causes of poverty. The book begins by introducing the quantitative approach to development economics. Each section uses data to illustrate key policy issues. Part One focuses on the basics of understanding the role of education, technology and institutions in determining why incomes differ so much across individuals and countries. In Part Two, the focus is on techniques to address a number of topics in development, including how firms invest, how households decide how much to spend on their children's education, whether microcredit helps the poor, whether food aid works, who gets private schooling and whether property rights enhance investment. A distinctive feature of the book is its presentation of a range of approaches to studying development questions. Development economics has undergone a major change in focus over the last decade with the rise of experimental methods to address development issues; this book shows how these methods relate to more traditional ones. Please visit the book's website at www.empiricalde.com for online supplements including Stata files and solutions to the exercises.

Understanding why so many people across the world are so poor is one of the central intellectual challenges of our time. This book provides the tools and data that will enable students, researchers and professionals to address that issue. Empirical Development Economics has been designed as a hands-on teaching tool to investigate the causes of poverty. The book begins by introducing the quantitative approach to development economics. Each section uses data to illustrate key policy issues. Part One focuses on the basics of understanding the role of education, technology and institutions in determining why incomes differ so much across individuals and countries. In Part Two, the focus is on techniques to address a number of topics in development, including how firms invest, how households decide how much to spend on their children's education, whether microcredit helps the poor, whether food aid works, who gets private schooling and whether property rights enhance investment. A distinctive feature of the book is its presentation of a range of approaches to studying development questions. Development economics has undergone a major change in focus over the last decade with the rise of experimental methods to address development issues; this book shows how these methods relate to more traditional ones. Please visit the book's website at www.empiricalde.com for online supplements including Stata files and solutions to the exercises.

While it is possible for economies to grow based on abundant land or natural resources, more often structural change-the shift of resources from low-productivity to high-productivity sectors-is the key driver of economic growth. Structural transformation is vital for Africa. The region's much-lauded growth turnaround since 1995 has been the result of making fewer economic policy mistakes, robust commodity prices, and new discoveries of natural resources. At the same time, Africa's economic structure has changed very little. Primary commodities and natural resources still account for the bulk of the region's exports. Industry is most often the leading driver of structural transformation. Africa's experience with industrialization over the past thirty years has been disappointing. In 2010, sub-Saharan Africa's average share of manufacturing value added in GDP was ten per cent, unchanged from the 1970s. Actually, the share of medium- and high-tech goods in manufacturing production has been falling since the mid-1990s. Per capita manufactured exports are less than ten per cent of the developing country average. Consequently, Africa's industrial transformation has yet to take place. This book presents results of comparative country-based research that sought to answer a seemingly simple but puzzling question: why is there so little industry in Africa? It brings together detailed country case studies of industrial policies and industrialization outcomes in eleven countries, conducted by teams of national researchers in partnership with international experts on industrial development. It provides the reader with the most comprehensive description and analysis available to date of the contemporary industrialization experience in low-income Africa. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.