The heightened interest of African countries to access international capital markets has put public debt sustainability once again high on the continent’s policy agenda. Applying the ‘stabilizing primary balance approach’ to sustainability shows that the primary balances exceeded those...

The paper investigates whether the decline in environmental quality in BRIC economies is due to high energy consumption level which is a resultant of rapid economic growth. We answer this using environmental, macroeconomic and financial variables along with Kyoto Protocol indicators based on...

Productivity growth has long been associated with, among others, contestability of markets which, in turn, is dependent on the ease with which potential competitors to the incumbent firms can enter the product market. There is a growing consensus that in emerging markets regulatory and...

Most papers on banking focus on profitability and cost efficiency as measures of performance. In doing so, these papers ignore the fact that, unlike in the manufacturing and services sector industries, the long term viability of a bank depends more on its ability to assess credit worthiness of...

Zimbabwe faces growth and external competitiveness challenges, as indicated by its low trend growth and investment, declining share in the world exports, high current account deficits, and external debt. The stock-flow approach to the equilibrium exchange rate reveals that the real exchange rate...

The informal economy has burgeoned in many transition economies but particularly in those of the Former Soviet Union. While this variation has commonly been related to the prevalent tax regimes and the degree of transparency in the legal and commercial system, the causality is far from obvious...

The shortages of entrepreneurial skills have lowered search effectiveness of potential young entrepreneurs and the rate of youth start-ups. Our paper contributes to closing a gap in the entrepreneurship and development literature with a model of costly firm creation and skill differences between...