This paper explores the reasons for the unbalanced growth structure of South Africa. While a number of emerging markets show a high proportion of value added and employment being generated by the service sector, South Africa is one of very few such economies that also show a strong decline in...

Using novel measures of technology diffusion and adoption developed by Comin and Hobijn (2012), we examine the role of finance in the timing of adoption and the diffusion of thirteen sectoral technologies in 44 Sub-Saharan Africa countries. These technologies cover sectors such as agriculture,...

We examine the association between indicators of real GDP per capita and the ACP1 genetic adaptation to disease and ultraviolet radiation environment. We find a strong impact that varies across the A, B, and C alleles. The result is robust to controlling for reversal of fortunes, migration, and...

This study investigates the drivers of competitiveness in African economies. While the macroeconomic perspective focuses on the behavior of the real effective exchange rate (REER), and the international competition framework emphasizes export market shares (EXPS), the business strategy framework...

Increased globalisation, coupled with rising domestic competition, has led a growing number of firms to search beyond their traditional domestic markets for business opportunities in recent years. As a result, export-led economic growth has gained renewed attention amongst policy makers,...

This paper develops a model positing a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth. The model is then applied to a panel of African countries using nonlinear estimating procedures. The growth-maximizing level of public investment is estimated at about 10 percent of GDP based on...

Although the title seems to be a contradictio in terminis, this paper shows that there are a small eclectic number of central banks with private shareholders. This paper reviews this selected group of central banks on which surprisingly little has been published. The first challenge is to...

Climate change has been classed as the greatest and urgent global issue facing humanity today, yet the empirics of the debate remain largely muted, more so with reference to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where the impact of warming global temperatures are forecasted to have the worst impact. This...

Rather than a rigid racial ideology, it is argued that South African apartheid was a pragmatic response of a white oligarchy to changing economic and political constraints. Consequently, the degree to which apartheid principles were applied and enforced by the South African state varied over...

This paper establishes the prevailing financial factors that influence credit spread variability, and its impact on the U.S. business cycle over the Great Moderation and Great Recession periods. To do so, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium framework with a central role of financial...