African Development Review-Revue Africaine De Developpement最新文献

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has been hailed as a key pillar and catalyst for economic growth, industrialization, and sustainable development in Africa. One of the anticipated benefits is the promise to increase intra-African trade through the elimination of import duties and other tariffs among countries. However, due to the heterogeneity between the African countries, questions remain as to whether each country will benefit from tariff elimination. This paper aims to evaluate the macroeconomic, fiscal, and welfare consequences of import tax removal in Senegal with the rest of Africa. We link an extended version of the partnership for economic policy (PEP) static computable general equilibrium (CGE) model with a non-parametric microsimulation approach. We calibrate the model with Senegal's most recent Social Accounting Matrix. The microeconomic model is calibrated using the latest Senegalese household consumption survey. The findings indicate that tariff removal from the rest of Africa has favorable economic, fiscal, and welfare impacts for Senegal. The paper suggests that it will lead to an increase in economic growth and investment. The removal of tariffs is expected to favor urban households over rural ones and leads to a modest decrease in income inequality, accompanied by a 3.36% reduction in the number of poor.

This study investigates the dynamic linkages among government expenditure, informality, and economic growth in 15 Eastern and Southern African countries over a 25-year period during 1991–2015. The analysis exploits panel vector autoregressive models to construct the time path of one variable following an orthogonal shock to another variable using impulse response functions. The analysis is complemented by panel quantile regressions to investigate the potential role of informality in the expenditure–economic growth nexus. The findings are threefold. First, both government consumption and investment expenditure have positive and significant effects on real per capita GDP. Second, informality has a direct negative impact on real per capita GDP. Third, the informal sector dampens the impact of government expenditure on real per capita GDP. These results are robust to the inclusion of selected control variables and are unchanged across GDP quantiles. The study's findings suggest that government policies aimed at reducing informality can have direct impacts on economic growth and indirect impacts through improvements in the effectiveness of government expenditure.

Motivated by the pressing need to address environmental concerns, this study explores the relationship between environmental taxes and CO₂ emissions embodied in domestic final demand in South Africa. The study uses a non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model to analyse the asymmetric impact of environmental taxes. Results indicate that environmental taxes have an asymmetric impact on CO₂ emissions embodied in domestic final demand in both the short and long runs. Specifically, both positive and negative shifts in environmental taxes are linked with a respective 0.06% decrease and a more pronounced 0.22% decrease in CO₂ emissions embodied in domestic final demand. Moreover, positive shocks in the GDP growth rate are associated with an approximately 0.002% uptick in CO₂ emissions, while negative shocks lead to a 0.012% decrease. Additionally, both positive and negative shocks in population growth exhibit a significant positive correlation with the response variable. The baseline estimates demonstrate that the joint effect of environmental taxes and the GDP growth rate is correlated with reductions in CO₂ emissions embodied in domestic final demand. Similarly, the joint influence of environmental taxes and population growth rate is linked to declines in CO₂ emissions. The study highlights the practical policy implications of these findings.