The paper explores the quality of the recent high-growth episode in sub-Saharan Africa by examining the following two questions: (i) what has been the nature and pattern of SSA growth over the past 15 years and how does it compare with previous episodes? (ii) has this growth had an impact on...

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...

Spillovers from South Africa into the other members of the Souther Africa Customs Union (known as the BLNS for Botstwana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland) are substantial reflecting sizeable real and financial interlinkages. However, shocks to real GDP growth in South Africa do not seem to...

This study examines the drivers of growth in Sub-Saharan African countries, using aggregate data, from the past decade. We correlate recent growth experience to key determinants of growth, including private and public investment, government consumption, the exchange regime and real exchange...

We examine the role of household financial access in determining the extent of risk sharing in Nigeria using household-level panel data. We estimate changes in the response of consumption to shocks for households with formal and informal access to finance and those without, both for the country...

Economic volatility remains a fact of life in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). Household-level shocks create large consumption fluctuations, raising the incidence of poverty. Drawing on micro-level data from South Africa and Tanzania, we examine the vulnerability to shocks across household types (e.g....

From the early 1960s to the early 1980s, the officially recorded output of cocoa in Ghana declined by 60 percent. During the 1983-95 Economic Recovery Program, however, cocoa official output doubled. Although these developments have inspired much empirical research, most of the studies have been...

This paper assesses competitiveness in the case of the Central African Republic, a post-conflict country. The paper presents several conventional techniques for assessing competitiveness, namely the real exchange rate and recent trade performance. Several other measures are considered, in...

This paper presents a simple partial equilibrium framework for considering the economic implications of administered protection in Tanzania, against the background of the country`s parallel exchange market and the establishment of the own-funds and open general license (OGL) facilities for...

The paper analyzes the dynamics of inflation in Guinea during 1992-2003 applying cointegration and error-correction modeling to a bivariate model that includes consumer price and monetary variables. The empirical results, based on quarterly data, confirm the existence of a long-run relationship...