Constitutional compliance — the degree to which governments adhere to their own constitutional rules — is widely assumed to underpin credible governance, yet its economic consequences remain poorly understood. This article investigates whether governments’ compliance with rules embedded in the constitution promotes labour reallocation from low-productivity agriculture to the industrial and services sectors. In particular, it argues that constitutional compliance facilitates structural labour mobility through a novel institutional transmission channel: promoting the implementation of economic reforms. The empirical analysis uses an unbalanced panel dataset of 44 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over 2000–2020 and the error-components two-stage least squares estimator. It shows that higher constitutional compliance significantly reduces the agricultural employment share and raises both industrial and services employment shares. Crucially, these effects operate through economic reforms — particularly in property rights, legal systems, and market entry. The findings underscore that closing the gap between constitutional rules and their implementation by governments is a critical enabling condition for the economic reforms that drive structural employment transformation. The fulfilment of their functions of - “Protection,” “Provision of social and economic services,” and “Participation of all citizens in political decision-making processes at different levels” – would allow SSA countries’ governments to enhance the effectiveness of economic reforms implementation and facilitate the sectoral reallocation of the labour force, including from the agricultural sector to other economic sectors, notably the industrial and/or services sectors.
GNANGNON et al. (Wed,) studied this question.