The paper examines the rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) as a new source of financing investment worldwide and, more specifically, tries to get a better understanding of SWFs from Middle East which accounted in 2013 for 35 percent of overall assets managed by them, with the bulk of them...

The spectacular surge in Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) has been reinforced by China’s accession to the WTO (2001). The understanding of their determinants remains a key theoretical question, in particular whether they confirm the standard conceptual framework -...

The neoclassical growth model predicts that emerging countries with higher TFP growth should receive larger capital inflows. Gourinchas and Jeanne (2007) document that, in fact, countries that exhibited higher productivity catch-up received less capital inflows, even though they invested more in...

This paper investigates the impact of the corporate income tax on the geographical distribution of French firms Foreign Direct Investment port- folio across 26 European countries. The empirical assessment is based on Baldwin (1999) new economic geography model in which we focus on the location...

This paper analyzes the link between the exchange rate misalignments and the external balance under a pegged currency system focusing on the CFA zone. Having discussed and chosen an appropriate analytical framework, it addresses the issue of model uncertainty regarding the equilibrium exchange...

In this paper, we analyse currencies' misalignments of the CFA zone countries and the adjustment process of their real effective exchange rates towards their equilibrium level over the period 1985-2007. To this end, we firstly estimate, using panel cointegration techniques, a long term...

This paper investigates the relationship between energy prices and the real effective exchange rate of commodity-exporting countries. We consider two sets of countries: 10 energy-exporting and 23 non-fuel commodity-exporting countries over the period 1980-2011. Estimating a panel cointegrating...

This paper addresses difficulties in modelling exchange rates in South Africa. Real exchange rate models of earlier research seem to be sensitive to the sample period considered, alternative variable definition, data frequency and estimation methods. Alternative exchange rate models proposed in...

This paper aims at explaining why the CFA countries have successfully maintained a currency union for several decades, despite failing to meet many of optimum currency area criteria. We suggest that the CFA zone, while not optimal, has been at least sustainable. We test this sustainability...

This paper aims to study the optimality of a monetary union in West Africa by using a new methodology based on the analysis of convergence and co-movements between exchange rate misalignments. Two main advantages characterize this original framework. First, it brings together the information...