The employment impact of product innovations in sub-Saharan Africa: Firm-level evidence
Elvis Avenyo, Maty Konte & Pierre Mohnen
#2019-019
Innovation has become a key interest in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), as it
is argued to be pervasive, and play eminent role in generating
employment. There is, however, a dearth of empirical evidence assessing
the impact of innovation on firm employment for SSA. This paper
investigates the impact of product innovations on job creation using
data from the recent waves of the Enterprise Survey merged with
Innovation Follow-Up Survey for SSA countries for which both surveys are
available. We apply the Dose Response Model under continuous and
heterogeneous responses to treatment. The results reveal a positive
impact of product innovations on total employment. This result is,
however, found to hold only at specific intervals of product innovation
intensities. Our analyses also show that product innovations tend to
create both temporary and permanent jobs as well as skilled and
unskilled jobs. However, the positive impact of product innovations on
temporary and unskilled employment tends to outweigh that of permanent
and skilled employment, raising questions about the security and quality
of the new jobs generated by product innovations.
Keywords: Employment, Product Innovations, Dose Response Model, sub-Saharan Africa
JEL Classification: J23, J3, O31, O33, L1