and domestic inputs for Sudan is 99.9%. Low imports are expected for this country, but the almost entire absence of any notable import flows at least raises the suspicion that imports and domestic values are not recorded in the same units.<sup>16</sup> Omitting the five most extreme outliers, does not greatly affect the cross-country averages for value added (38%) and domestically sourced inputs (48%) or the average importance of foreign sourcing (14%). The main message is that one should be careful with the data for some countries, but outliers tend to compensate each other with minimal impact on the overall pattern for the region.

Another important pattern is that the share of value added and domestically sourced intermediates are negatively correlated. As a result, the coefficient of variation (the ratio of the standard deviation to the average) for value added is 0.49 and for the share of domestic inputs it is 0.29, but there is much less variation for the sum, with a coefficient of variation of only 0.15. It suggests that even though countries differ a lot in the extent of vertical integration of their firms, the share of imported varies a lot less across countries.

Among the different sourcing destinations, Europe and the rest of the world (ROW) aggregate are by far the most important trading partners, respectively accounting for slightly more and slightly less than 5% of total output value created in the sector. Together they accounted for three quarters of all imported inputs in 1995 and 2005, but this lowered to two thirds in 2015. Other African countries are the next most important sourcing origin, but as could be expected, its importance varies widely across countries. For countries that neighbor South Africa, e.g. Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland, these imports are almost as important as domestically sourced inputs. This not the case for countries bordering North African countries.

Inputs imported from neighboring countries, i.e. within the sub-Saharan African region, are surprisingly unimportant. Together they account, on average, for 0.7% of total output value. This is only one twentieth of all imported inputs, which is not negligible, but notably lower than in regions with more integrated manufacturing sectors, such as the European Union or South-East Asia. Across all inputs sourced from sub-Saharan Africa, it is interesting to note that neighboring countries account for fully half even though they only represent one tenth of sub-Saharan African countries. Proximity is important. Finally, it is noteworthy that the importance of distant countries within the region (FAR) is the most variable input share. The coefficient of variation is 2.50 which is more than an order of magnitude larger than for the overall import share (where it was 0.15). For two thirds of all countries its share of total output is below 0.5%, but for the remaining countries it averages more than 2.5%.

> 16 If one is specifically interested in some of these countries, in particular Ethiopia or Sudan, it is plausible that some of these problems can be fixed by inspecting the underlying Eora data. Recall that we have aggregated the full IO table to country-specific tables eliminating some of the country and sector detail. In the source data, any misuse of local versus foreign currencies or a multiplication or division by 1000 in some years would be relatively easy to spot. In the more aggregated table that we work with it is hard to be certain because miscoded statistics are averaged with correct statistics.

23