This paper documents the steady increase in intraregional trade in sub-Saharan Africa since 1980, links this rise to important growth spillovers in the region, and identifies the main source countries and those most vulnerable to the economic conditions of others. Estimates show that in the...

Using twenty-five policy variables, we investigate determinants of mobile phone/banking in 49 Sub-Saharan African countries with data for the year 2011. The determinants are classified into six policy categories, notably: macroeconomic, business/bank, market-related, knowledge economy, external...

A recent publication by the World Bank on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has established that extreme poverty has been decreasing in all regions of the world with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in spite of over two decades of growth resurgence. This chapter explores the role of...

We revisit Lipset's law, which posits a positive and significant relationship between income and democracy. Using dynamic and heterogeneous panel data estimation techniques, we find a significant and negative relationship between income and democracy: higher/lower incomes per capita...

We investigate the link between gender inequality in financial inclusion and income inequality, with three contributions to the recent literature. First, using a micro-dataset covering 146,000 individuals in over 140 countries, we construct novel, synthetic indices of the intensity of financial...

Africa will account for 80 percent of the projected 4 billion increase in the global population by 2100. The accompanying increase in its working age population creates a window of opportunity, which if properly harnessed, can translate into higher growth and yield a demographic dividend. We...

We examine the impact of resource windfall on the standard of living both in the short-run and long-run, using a sample of 130 countries, 1963-2007. Then, we systematically investigate the effect of resource windfall on welfare in three different groups of countries: We find that in the...

In this study, nexuses between governance and natural resource rents are assessed in 44 sub-Saharan African countries using data for the period 1996-2016. The empirical evidence is based on Tobit regressions. The findings show that political governance (entailing “voice &...

The analysis of China's impacts on the 44 SSA countries reveals that: (i) after joining the WTO in 2001, China has started to impact significantly on SSA growth: one-percent increase in China's GDP per capita leads to 0.02 percent increase on the SSA's GDP per capita; (ii) oil and...