This paper challenges established claims of comparable degrees of market integration in Europe and China on the eve of industrialization. Our empirical strategy focuses on the dynamics of price convergence and accounts for general equilibrium effects arising from common shocks and network...

Purpose - Our generation is witnessing the greatest demographic transition and Africa is at the heart of it. There is mounting concern over corresponding rising unemployment and depleting per capita income. I examine the issues in this paper from a long-run perspective by assessing the...

Our generation is experiencing the greatest demographic transition and Africa is at the center of it. There is mounting concern over corresponding rising unemployment and depleting per capita income. We examine the issues in this paper from a long-run perspective by assessing the relationships...

This paper examines how regionalization in the face of globalization has affected financial development in the context of banking system efficiency in Africa. Results which are robust to financial system efficiency and growth-led-finance nexus reveal that in the post-regionalization era: (1)...

Hitherto financial drivers of human development have been unexplored by the UNDP. This paper assesses determinants of human development from financial dynamics of depth, efficiency, size and activity on data from 38 developing countries. While the importance of financial activity, size and depth...

This paper examines the big questions of African comparative politics. It assesses the interaction of three crucial components in the development of the continent: law, democracy and quality of government. Political regimes of democracy, polity and autocracy are instrumented with income-levels,...

This paper focuses on how political regimes affect financial development in Africa, contingent on religious-domination, income-levels and colonial-legacies. The main findings are summarized as follows. Authoritarian regimes have a higher propensity to effect policies that favour the development...

Purpose - The issue of which financial initial conditions are necessary to materialize the benefits of financial globalization remains open to debate in the literature. In this paper, we try to put some empirical structure on the concept of financial threshold conditions in order to give...

With the spectre of the Euro crisis looming substantially large and scaring potential monetary unions, this study is a short-run trip to embryonic African monetary zones to assess the Schumpeterian thesis for positive spillovers of financial services on growth. Causality analysis is performed...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of foreign aid in improving government institutions in 52 African countries using updated data (1996-2010). Findings suggest development assistance deteriorates government quality dynamics of corruption-control, political-stability, rule of law, regulation...