Elvis Korku Avenyo is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Competition, Regulation, and Economic Development (CCRED). Before joining CCRED, Elvis was a Research Officer on the Inclusive Digital Model (IDMODEL) Project at the Technology and Management Centre for Development (TMCD), University of Oxford. He was also a Global Excellence and Stature (GES) Fellow and an Open AIR QES-AS Fellow with our hub at the University of Johannesburg. He is a member of the Royal Economic Society, the Global Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems (Globelics Network) and Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM). He is also a Co-Founder of the Centre for Health Policy Advocacy, Innovation & Research in Africa (CHPAIR-Africa) located in Accra, Ghana.
Elvis has a PhD in Economics of Innovation, Policy Studies of Technical Change and Governance from the United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) / Maastricht University. He also holds a collaborative Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Economics from the University of Cape Coast and the African Economic Research Consortium’s Joint Facility for Electives: Collaborative Masters Programme (CMAP) in Economics.
Elvis’ specialisations within development economics are innovation, technical change, industrial development, labour markets, and firm behaviour. He has also conducted research on trade, global value chains, and COVID-19, among other related issues. He has published in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Research Policy, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, and has co-authored a chapter in UNESCO Science Report: Towards 2030.
QES-AS Research
Title: Innovation and the performance of informal enterprises in developing countries: a gender perspective
Abstract: Examining the impact of gender on various aspects of business performance has gained research and policy traction, although the empirical evidence remains inconclusive. This paper aims to focus on one type of business, namely, informal enterprises and one dimension of business performance, namely, product innovation, to better understand how product innovations affect employment in both female- and male-owned informal enterprises. This paper relies on a unique data set of 513 informal enterprises located in two urban centres in Ghana (Accra and Tema), covering the period between 2013 and 2015 and the Dose-Response Model to examine the effect of product innovations on employment in informal enterprises in urban Ghana. The findings suggest that product innovation has considerable beneficial impacts on the creation of employment in informal enterprises. The results do not show systematic differences in the factors affecting product innovation in female- and male-owned enterprises. However, they suggest that although female-owned enterprises are less likely to introduce product innovations, they do sell more innovative products. These findings support the view that innovation is “gendered”, and therefore, requires a “gendered” policy lens.
