During the early modern age, shaping the mechanisms and guarantees of financial and commercial transactions was the basis for the expansion of commercial markets: the beginning of market globalization was due not only to the discovery of a new continent and new trade routes, but also to the...

This study investigates the causal links among agricultural imports, agriculture productivity, and economic growth in 40 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1990-2015. Granger causality tests are applied to infer direction of causality, and the generalized two-stage least squares...

This paper uses panel data of 42 sub-Saharan Africa countries from 2005 to 2015 to examine the effect of aid for trade (AfT) on export diversification. The average Hirschman-Herfindahl index measure of 0.77 indicates that the export basket of sub-Saharan African countries is very narrow. This is...

About fifty years after the independence of most former colonies on the African continent, books on African nationalism again rank high on the agenda of the international academic discussion. A selection of three recent publications demonstrates the advances made in scholarly analysis in the...

This study identifies the drivers of carbon dioxide emission and measures its effects on climate change in the countries of the Congo Basin. It applies panel Autoregressive Distributed lag (ARDL) model to Kaya's (1990) identity framework, which breaks up the main determinants of carbon dioxide...

The growth and deepening of financial markets entailed the expectation that the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission would lose its importance. The paper explains why, on the contrary, the banking sector has become a major locus of origination and amplification of macro-financial...

This study analyses the effect of Kazakhstan’s 2003–2005 agricultural land reform on land rental and credit market participation. Although the reform declared an intention to facilitate efficient land allocation, we observe a major land concentration. We analyze whether new land relations...

This paper addresses the question of the optimal debt level of a state (canton) that issues new bonds and subsequently invests the borrowed capital. For that purpose, we first estimate the effect of the debt level on the interest rate and then we contrast the predicted interest rate with...