The new international financial architecture can help African countries benefit from globalization, while minimizing the risks, and foster an environment conducive to increased domestic investment and higher sustained growth. This paper highlights the progress that African countries have made in...

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 the deficits are (i) not very persistent; (ii) positively linked with domestic growth; (iii) strongly linked with public (and...

This paper examines how institutional conditions in transition economies compare with those in the rest of the world using various indicators of governance. The focus is on the countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union but, when possible, transition countries, in Asia...

This paper assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the French and British public expenditure management systems as used in Africa. The main differences are in budget execution and government accounting. In both francophone and anglophone Africa, there are common weaknesses in the...

This paper examines past African growth experience and attempts to simulate future ones. In addition to more commonly used determinants of total factor productivity, a measure of the effect of labor reallocation and an index of economic diversification are constructed and included as factors for...

The critical role of agricultural commodities in the growth of low-income countries is examined. A combination of factors has resulted in declining agricultural prices, necessitating further increasing volumes by developing countries to maintain export earnings. But low growth in factor...

This paper examines the relative importance of monetary growth and exchange rate depreciation as causes of inflation in a sample of 10 Sub-Saharan African countries. Causality tests and impulse response functions derived from vector autoregression (VAR) analysis suggest that both monetary...

This paper discusses the main operational issues involved in the implementation of interbank foreign exchange systems in selected African countries. The countries considered are The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. The paper finds that exchange rates in these markets...

The pace of progress toward achievement of the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) in many sub-Saharan African countries remains too slow to reach targets by 2015, despite significant progress in the late 1990s. The MDG Africa Steering Group, convened in September 2007 by the UN Secretary-General,...

Over the past two decades, sub-Saharan Africa has lagged behind other regions in economic performance. The important overall indicators of performance, however, mask wide differences among countries. On the whole, countries that effectively implemented comprehensive adjustment and reform...