2006): “What Have We Learned from a Decade of Manufacturing Enterprise

ment (RPED) in several African countries, a key component of which was to collect data on manufacturing firms. The data sets built by these and subsequent enterprise surveys in Africa generated considerable research. This article surveys the research on the African business environment, focusing on risk, access to credit, labor, and infrastructure, and on how firms organize themselves and do business. It reviews the research on enterprise per-formance, including enterprise growth, investment, and exports. The article concludes with a discussion of policy lessons. The idea that better private-sector performance in Africa can reduce poverty remains central in policy discussions. Even though the performance of Africa’s man-ufacturing sector has generally been quite poor over the last 10–15 years (Mauritius is a conspicuous exception), many people still believe that manufacturing can act as an engine of growth on the continent, by creating skilled jobs and positive spillover effects and, more generally, by modernizing the economy. In the early 1990s, to get a better idea of why things were going wrong in the manufacturing sector and how to improve them, the World Bank fielded extensive data collection projects in many African countries. Such data collection has subsequently become a regular exercise in at least some African countries. This article reviews the findings that have emerged from this research, focusing primarily on research published after peer review.1 The results reported in this survey are thus based on enterprise survey data. The article argues that the availability of such data has greatly improved our under-standing of Africa’s manufacturing sector. Certain research questions cannot be answered by relying on aggregate data. It may be that the researcher has to analyze Pu bl ic Di sc lo su re A ut ho riz ed Pu bl ic Di sc lo su re A ut ho riz ed Pu bl ic Di sc lo su re A ut ho riz e