"Measuring Changes In The Ghanaian Firm Size Distribution: 1962-2014"

About the Seminar

Andrew Kerr and Bruce McDougall

In this paper we aim to examine how Ghanaian manufacturing has changed over time by comparing four firm censuses.  These censuses are the National Industrial Censuses of 1962, 1987 and 2003, and the Integrated Business Establishment Survey of 2014, conducted by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS). 

Treated as is, the censuses give dramatic and somewhat unbelievable results about how the scale of manufacturing production in Ghana has changed over time. We use micro data from the 1987, 2003 and 2014 firm censuses try to make these as comparable as possible, finding that average firm size in Ghana shrunk between 1987 and 2003, and again between 2003 and 2014. 

In the process of our analysis we highlight that what a firm census actually is can differ quite dramatically within one country and between countries, and that this has implications for recent work highlighting the need for firm census data and examining the firm size distribution across countries. 


About the Presenter


Andrew Kerr is a Chief Research Officer and Acting Director of DataFirst in SALDRU. His research focuses on labour markets in Sub-Saharan Africa and includes work on household and firm survey data as well as admin data from UCT and SARS. He was an undergraduate student at  UKZN and obtained a PhD from the University of Oxford.



Date: Wednesday,28 November 2018
Lunch: 12h30 - 13h00, Staff Lounge, 4th Floor, School of Economics, Middle Campus
Seminar: 13h00 - 14h00, Seminar Room, 4th Floor, School of Economics, Middle Campus