Access to finance has been considered to be one of the important factors in influencing firms‘ real activities and in promoting aggregates. However, literature on the relationship between finance and firm-level productivity is almost non-existent for African countries. This paper fills this gap by using cross-sectional firm-level data to estimate the effect of access to finance on labour productivity, total factor productivity (TFP), and the stochastic frontier trans-log model. This study estimates an instrumental variable model – two-stage estimator to address potential endogeneity bias between access to credit and firms‘ productivity. The results obtained show that the lack of access to finance, especially overdraft facilities negatively affects the productivity of firms in Africa. Also, smaller firms and sole proprietorships are mostly affected because they have less access to finance. This study
suggests that the development of a balanced financial system should be of topmost priority to
policy makers. This ensures that more finance is channelled towards those firms whose
productivity depends heavily on the availability of finance irrespective of their characteristics. This would result in firms increasing their investments in productivity-enhancing activities, which would benefit long-term economic growth.
