African countries have sought to replicate the success of East Asia by implementing special economic zones. Despite decades of international experience, there remains no blueprint for successful special economic zone policies, and the majority of special economic zones fall well below...

Estimating the impact of HIV/AIDS epidemic on economic growth is challenging because of endogeneity concerns. In this paper, we use novel data on male circumcision and distance from the first HIV outbreak as instrumental variables for the HIV/AIDS epidemic in 241 regions across 25 countries in...

The primary policy response to suppress the spread of COVID-19 in high-income countries has been to lock down large sections of the population. However, there is growing unease that blindly replicating these policies might inflict irreparable damage to poor households and foment social unrest in...

The distinct features of inclusive growth within the context of sub-Saharan Africa are identified. The anatomy of growth is analysed by exploring the interrelationship among growth, inequality, and poverty. The present growth spell appears to have been relatively inclusive. The recent structural...

Researchers have linked sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) poor growth performance in recent decades to several factors, including geography, institutions, and low returns to investment. This literature has not yet integrated the research that identifies linkages between gender, economic development,...

The general policy prescription for resource-rich countries is that, for sustainable consumption, a greater percentage of the windfall from resource rents should be channelled into accumulating foreign assets such as a sovereign public fund as done in Norway and other developed but resource-rich...

COVID-19 cases were first confirmed in March 2020 in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. These countries put in place several stringent measures, including lockdowns, to contain the spread of the virus. Various policies were also rolled out to address the disruption in economic activities, to...

This paper reviews the current problems of national accounting in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the current uneven application of methods and availability of data, any ranking of countries according to gross domestic product levels is misleading. It is increasingly acknowledged that the problems...

This paper is a contribution to the empirics of climate change and its effect on sustainable economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data on two climate variables, temperature and precipitation, and employing panel cointegration techniques, we estimate the short- and long-run effects of...

Commodity price shocks are an important type of external shock and are often cited as a problem for economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper quantifies the impact of agricultural commodity price shocks using a near vector autoregressive model. The novel aspect of this model is that we...