Publications by PSE researchers

This paper identifies export accelerations at the country pair-product level that are large enough to drive aggregate export growth in the medium run. In a sample of 100 countries, these export “big hits” are rare, less than 2 percent of all export spells, yet account for over two-thirds of export growth in a given country. The paper then explores their microfoundations using matched customs-census firm-level data for France. We find that typically, two firms are sufficient to generate a big hit and these firms’ access to external financing is key to their ability to drive export success. Moreover, big hits spread within firms across destinations and products. Our results offer new evidence on the granularity of export growth by linking micro-level entrepreneurial decisions with country-level export outcomes.

Ce chapitre traite de deux enjeux majeurs auxquels sont confrontés les ménages ruraux en zone tropicale : préserver les ressources naturelles et assurer la sécurité alimentaire. Relever ces deux défis simultanément requiert de développer des systèmes de production efficaces, capables à la fois de garantir la sécurité alimentaire des agriculteurs et d’assurer une gestion durable des ressources naturelles. Pour ce faire, il convient de s’interroger sur les liens directs et indirects entre la sécurité alimentaire des ménages et la biodiversité à l’échelle de l’exploitation agricole et à celle du paysage.

The paper offers a detailed review of African firms' participation to international value chains and provides new quantitative insights on two countries, Cameroon and Ivory Coast, based on a unique dataset, which was obtained by merging firm census and detailed customs transactions over time. “GVC firms” are defined as firms that both export and import, with positive production and labour. The paper characterises GVC firms in the two countries. GVC firms represent about 15% of manufacturing firms; they are more frequent than pure exporters, a sign of the challenges faced by firms in those countries if they want to sell abroad. In line with the literature on firm heterogeneity and trade, firms engaged in GVCs are larger, more productive and live longer than one‐way‐traders or domestic firms. African markets are the main destination of manufacturing GVCs in Ivory Coast, while Cameroon GVC firms rely on OECD (including for agricultural exports). There is limited cross‐penetration between African‐oriented and OECD‐oriented GVC firms over time. The probability of moving into a GVC is higher for exporters than for importers, showing that exporting is a stepping stone for African firms to join a GVC.

This chapter deals with two major issues rural households face in tropical areas: preserving natural resources and guaranteeing food security. Tackling these two challenges simultaneously may require developing profitable production systems that can both guarantee food security for farmers, while also ensuring sustainable management of natural resources.

The first official trip to Africa of the new Managing Director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, took place in Dakar on December 2, 2019, to participate in an international conference organized by the Republic of Senegal and the Cercle des économistes, in partnership with the IMF, the World Bank and the United Nations. Entitled “Sustainable Development and Sustainable Debt: Striking the Right Balance”, this meeting was exceptional with the participation of six Heads of State (representing Senegal, Togo, Burkina Faso, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire and Benin) and the Prime Minister of Mali who engaged in an open and symmetrical dialogue with the leaders of international organizations and the many experts and academics who attended.

This paper examines intergenerational wealth mobility between fathers and children in France between 1848 and 1960. Considering wealth mobility in the long run requires taking into account not only positional mobility (that is, how families move within a given distribution of wealth), but also structural mobility induced by changes in the distribution of wealth. Such changes are related to two structural phenomena: in the nineteenth century, the rising number of individuals leaving no estate at death and, after World War I, the decline in the number of the very rich who could live off their wealth. The paper studies the movements between these groups and estimates the intergenerational elasticity of wealth, taking into account the persistence at the bottom and at the top.

The paper examines the impact of food aid on households’ marketing behavior, based on a panel of households followed during 1994–2009 in 15 villages of Ethiopia. The impact of aid is examined at the intensive margin (on quantities produced, sold or bought by the households) and at the extensive margin (on the number of producers, sellers and buyers). Food aid reduces the probability of being a producer. It also increases the probability of being a seller after a reform of aid policy in 2004 from “repeated emergency distributions” toward a multi-year program aiming at agricultural development.

A la suite d’une série d’alertes sanitaires (la crise de la vache folle en 1992, le poulet à la dioxine en 1999), l’Europe a renforcé son appareil réglementaire concernant la sécurité alimentaire. À la différence des droits de douane, les normes n’ont en principe pas d’effet intrinsèquement discriminatoire sur les importations dans la mesure où elles s’appliquent autant aux produits intérieurs qu’aux produits importés. Toutefois, elles peuvent avoir un effet dissuasif, intentionnellement ou non, et deviennent dans ce cas ce que l’on appelle en droit commercial international des « obstacles techniques au commerce ». De ce fait, à la suite de la mise en place d’une norme ou lorsqu’une norme existante devient plus exigeante, certains producteurs du Sud n’arrivent plus à exporter vers les pays du Nord. Au niveau de l’UE, cela se traduirait par un recentrage des sources d’approvisionnement pour les produits pour lesquels il existe un risque sanitaire. Afin d’explorer cette hypothèse, nous avons étudié la structure des importations agro-alimentaires de l’UE et son évolution, en lien avec le risque sanitaire des produits. Nous avons estimé ce dernier en exploitant les alertes sanitaires notifiées par les états membres de l’UE sur leurs importations agricoles. Les importations agro-alimentaires de l’UE ont évolué depuis 1988 vers une structure à deux vitesses : d’une part, à la marge intensive, les pays européens ont tendance à concentrer le gros de leurs achats vers quelques pays ; de l’autre, à la marge extensive, le nombre de pays fournisseurs de l’UE augmente, mais les nouveaux entrants envoient tout d’abord de plus petites quantités. Cette structure à deux vitesses est plus marquée pour les produits à risque sanitaire élevé.

This literature review first presents the credit constraints faced by small and medium firms and the instruments that could be implemented to reduce such constraints. In this first part, we also present different impact evaluation methods and describe the ones that could be used for the different instruments above mentioned. We then review three types of instruments which are often implemented: credit lines, guarantee mechanisms and investment funds. For each of these instruments, we present its aims and objectives, as well as the way to evaluate it. We also expose the results of some evaluations previously conducted and available in the literature. For each instrument, we also highlight some specific insights and potentially useful for the French Agency of Development.

We investigate how rising sanitary risk of agri-food products affects the geographical concentration of European Union (EU) imports at the product level. We first estimate a product-specific measure of sanitary risk based on the count of food alerts at EU borders. Then we regress the evolution of geographical concentration indices on our measure of product risk and year. We find that product sanitary risk indeed affected the EU import pattern. Overall, the EU diversified its import sources, but with diversification at the extensive margin and concentration at the intensive margin. This pattern is stronger for risky products, leading to a two-tier system.