The stock market operates on informed decisions based on information gathered from heterogeneous sources, encompassing diverse beliefs, strategies, and knowledge. This study examines the validity of rational bubbles in stock market prices, focusing on eight African stock markets: South Africa,...

About five decades the Franc CFA - Zone in Western and Central Africa was praised as incarnation of economic and political stability in Africa, backed by France. But free convertibility and fixed parity, guaranteed by the French Treasury, mainly served the interest of a small elite of the...

This paper analyzes the behavior of current account deficits in Africa and estimates whether the deficits are excessive with respect to fundamentals. The findings are that deficits are (i) not very persistent; (ii) positively linked with domestic growth; (iii) strongly linked with public (and...

Many developments witnessed in 2005 in the world economy have important implications for African economies. There are many issues raised pertaining global imbalances and they obviously occupied center stage in the monetary and other economic policies of developing and developed countries. The...

This paper addresses whether parallel market exchange rates in Africa behave in the long run in a manner consistent with the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis. A recent econometric method, the panel co-integration test, enables us to examine the long-run PPP hypothesis by pooling the...

This study tests for long-run relative purchasing power parity among a sample of 27 African less developed countries. For this purpose, a new test advocated by Im and co-workers is employed which allows one to test for unit roots in heterogeneous panel datasets. This is known as the t-bar test,...

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...

The rise in economic growth in some countries of Africa over past two decades, powered mainly by productivity boom, has been associated with large private capital inflows despite poor integration of the African countries with the world capital markets. While these countries lack access to world...

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...

This study examines capital flows and shifts in capital account and exchange rate regimes in African countries over the past two decades. The evidence shows that official lending to Africa has declined while the volume of private capital flows remains low and significantly below the levels...