Mwangi wa Githinji, UMass Amherst economics professor, has been awarded the Faculty Research Grant/Healy Endowment Grant for the March 2010 award cycle. Offered by the UMass Amherst Office of Research, the Faculty Research Grant/Healey Endowment Grant program encourages scholarly research and creative activities by members of the campus faculty; the program’s goal is to increase extramural sponsored research activity.
His research project, titled Industrialization by Destination: The relationship between trade and industrialization in African countries, involves a two part study. First, he will examine the level of sophistication of trade and its relation to industrialization in the country of origin, both historically and cross country in Africa. Second, he will estimate what determines the sophistication of the exports. In particular, he is interested in seeing whether African countries that exported to less sophisticated markets (mostly other African countries) had more sophisticated exports than you would expect given their human capital, GDP, physical capital, institutions and land size.
