Essays on Productive Efficiency, Trade, and Market Power: Evidence from African Manufacturing Firms

This thesis examines three main themes, firms productive efficiency, internationalisation of African firms, and effect of liberalisation policies on market power and market imperfections. The thesis combines two main strands in economics literature in accessing the three main themes of the papers. The first strand regards methodological approaches to estimate a production function from which productive efficiency can be computed. Consistent estimation of productive efficiency is a necessary condition to analyse firm behaviour and their response to trade policies. The thesis critically examines methodologies to estimate productive efficiency. The second strand, international trade and industrial development, analyse firms behaviour in foreign market as well as firms responses to trade liberalisation policies and their overall impact on structural transformation. The two strands of literature examined in this thesis resulted in three independent papers, each of which addresses specific issues along the spectrum of productive efficiency estimation, internationalisation, and market power.