Governors and senior officials representing some two dozen central banks from Africa and other regions of the world met at the BIS in May 2011 to discuss the monetary policy and financial stability issues facing Africa after the global financial crisis. This volume brings together the background...

How do emerging market corporates fare during periods of currency depreciation? We find that non-financial firms that exploit favorable global financing conditions to issue US dollar bonds and build cash balances are also those whose share price is most vulnerable to local currency depreciation....

Central banks in Africa are changing as the continent becomes increasingly integrated with the global financial system. In this context, governors from major central banks met in Basel on 11-12 May 2013 to compare notes on their experiences in dealing with the challenges of increased financial...

The policy response of many African commodity exporting economies to the slump in commodity prices after mid-2014 has been markedly different from that of commodity exporters elsewhere. First, few African countries allowed their currency to depreciate as much as other EMEs, for instance in Latin...

The impressive growth of many African economies during the past decade was highly dependent on booming commodity markets and strong capital inflows, often related to commodities. With commodity prices falling and market expectations pointing to little reversal in the foreseeable future,...

This study evaluates the economic impact of the proposed COMESA-SADC-EAC Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) on 26 African countries. It uses the global trade analysis project (GTAP) computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and database to measure the static effects of the establishment of the...

This paper analyses the descriptive power of the different extensions of the Taylor rule. It also investigates whether monetary policy in South Africa can indeed be described by a linear Taylor rule or, instead, by a nonlinear rule. In particular, we extend the linear Taylor rule to a...

International aid has an ambiguous effect on the macro-economy of the recipient country. To the extent that aid raises consumer expenditure, there will be some real exchange rate appreciation and a shift of resources away from traded goods production and into non-traded goods production....

This paper develops a straightforward theoretical framework for evaluating exchange rate regime choice for small economies. It proposes that a floating exchange rate minimises national income and employment variation when real macroeconomic shocks predominate, whereas a pegged exchange rate...