period, there was increasing concentration in Accra, and this was large enough to offset a small decline in the proportion in Kumasi, resulting in an increasing share of manufacturing employment in the two most urban areas in Ghana.

Table 2 shows employment and firm numbers and shares in 2003 and 2013 for each of the 13 manufacturing industries used in the empirical analysis. Food, wearing apparel, wood and furniture manufacturing were the only industries with more than a 10% share of total employment in 2003. In 2013 the shares of wood and furniture making fell by 50% and 66% respectively. This reflects a general decline in these industries.

Table 3 shows the share of total manufacturing employment in Greater Accra in each manufacturing sub‐industry for 2003 and 2014. In 2003 the share was higher than 40% in 7 out of 13 industries, despite Greater Accra’s population share in 2000 being only 15%. In 2003 the industries in which Greater Accra did not have the largest share of employment were textiles, leather, furniture making and wood products. In wood and paper products Ashanti and Western region account for 80% of employment whilst they accounted for of 40% of employment in furniture making. It is of interest that these two industries were the only ones in which there was a decline in total employment between 2003 and 2014. In textiles Volta and Eastern region accounted for 40% of employment, whilst in leather Eastern region accounted for 72% of total employment. This suggests that whilst employment is concentrated in Greater Accra in many industries, this is not true in some industries, particularly the largest in 2003, wearing apparel and wood products.

In 2014 the share of total employment in Greater Accra was greater than 40% in 8 of 13 industries and increased in 11 of the 13 industries. The share decreased only in beverages and wearing apparel. The only industries in which Greater Accra did not have the largest share were again textiles, leather, wood, and not in wearing apparel, where Kumasi had the largest share. The region with the largest share of employment in furniture making became Greater Accra in 2014. This analysis suggests that the general trend was towards an increasing share of total manufacturing employment in Greater Accra, the most urbanized and most densely populated region in Ghana. The regression analysis below sheds further light on the processes that have contributed to this trend.

## **Industry‐district panel data**

The above descriptive analysis used the firm level data on regions and manufacturing subsectors to provide a broad overview of the changes in manufacturing in Ghana between 2003 and 2014. In this section we provide some descriptive statistics at the district and subsector level, since this is the unit of analysis in the regression work below.

Table 4 shows the 10<sup>th</sup> percentile, median and 90<sup>th</sup> percentile growth rates for each manufacturing subsector across all districts. Growth rates are calculated (in this table only) as suggested by Davis and Haltiwanger (1995):

# Emp growth= empt‐empt‐1)/(( empt+empt‐1)/2).

This is one way of avoiding very large growth rates having a disproportionate effect, but still making the resulting growth rates easily interpretable, which is not so easy when using the dependent variable used in the regressions. The growth rates calculated in this manner are bounded by ‐2 and 2. The median for all industry‐districts is 0.4, whilst the minimum is ‐1.83 and the maximum is 1.96. Table 4 shows that growth rates generally vary substantially within each industry across districts, even in industries that were shown in Table 2 above to have either grown or shrunk substantially. The two sectors shown to have shrunk‐ wood and furniture making, have median growth rates of 0 10