A benchmarking of Zambia’s manufacturing finance against selected newly industrialised countries

This study benchmarks Zambia’s manufacturing finance against selected Newly Industrialised Countries (NICs) to identify and remediate Zambia’s manufacturing finance policy gaps to enhance manufacturing development. It applies data envelopment and relative value analyses on a firm- and country-level merged dataset and finds that Zambia’s cost of capital, legal climate, taxation, firm size distribution, firm financial efficiency, firm formalisation, technology intensity, import dependence and share of domestic sales are inadequate relative to NICs. The study makes two main contributions; First, it pioneers a novel application of data envelopment and relative value analyses on firm manufacturing finance efficiency across countries and second, the paper provides the first quantitative benchmarking of Zambia’s manufacturing finance.