African Development Review-Revue Africaine De Developpement最新文献

The study investigated the effect of public debts on macroeconomic indicators, such as inflation and the exchange rate, using a panel of 25 sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies. The study contributed to extant studies by looking at the separate effect of domestic and foreign debts on inflation and exchange rate. We adopted a battery of econometric tools such as the Driscoll–Kraay standard errors and the dynamic panel threshold model. The results show that foreign debts worsen the inflation rate and expose the economy to unanticipated movements in the exchange rate, whereas domestic debts help to reduce the inflationary pressure. The study also found a nonlinear relationship between public debts and macroeconomic indicators of inflation and exchange rates. This implies the further accumulation of foreign debt will heighten the inflation rate and expose the region to unanticipated movements in the exchange rate. The study recommends that governments and policymakers in SSA should ensure that foreign debts are sufficiently hedged against currency and interest rate risks to reduce the exposure of SSA economies to exchange rate risks. The study also recommends that governments adhere strictly to the maximum debt limit of 60.59% (of gross domestic product), otherwise inflation and exchange rates may worsen.

This paper aims to analyze the effect of information and communication technology (ICT) diffusion on the shadow economic activities in Africa for the period from 2000 to 2015. To this end, we use a panel data model on a sample of 48 countries. The results obtained show that the diffusion of ICTs, especially mobile telephony and the Internet, negatively and significantly affect the size of the shadow economy in Africa. The level of education, capital stock, economic growth, and financial development also contribute to reducing the size of the informal economy in Africa. However, our results suggest that informal activities are motivated by the abundance of natural resources and migrant remittances. Robustness checks are done through the system generalized method of moments and a change in the measurement of the shadow economy confirms the validity of the results. We recommend to decision-makers to implement public policies facilitating the access and the use of new telecommunications tools and services and to improve the institutional framework to encourage private economic agents to invest in formal activities.

The effectiveness of food aid in reducing household food insecurity in developing countries has been extensively examined in previous studies. This study explores this issue in the context of COVID-19, using the example of emergency food aid provided by the Senegalese government. Field survey data were collected from 4500 recipients and non-recipients, and the matching method was used to examine whether there was a significant difference between the two groups. Several dimensions of food insecurity were explored through five indicators: the food consumption score and the coping strategies index from the World Food Programme and three indicators of simple, moderate and severe food insecurity based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale of the US Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The results show that government aid has a negative and significant impact on the diversity and nutritional value of beneficiary households' diets. Nevertheless, this programme prevented the use of extreme coping strategies. Furthermore, government aid has a positive impact on food security as measured by negative experiences related to food access. Ultimately, despite low nutritional intake, the programme had a positive effect on recipients’ food access compared with non-beneficiaries. Therefore, for future interventions, the government should promote local and more nutritious products to sustainably improve food security.

The establishment of the continental free trade area in Africa is an important step forward for the creation of a market of significant size in a context of sluggish job creation. This study examines the effects of intra-African exports on aggregate and sectoral employment using the fixed-effects model with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors. The data covers 44 African countries over the period 1995–2018. The results show that intra-African exports increase both sectoral and aggregate employment. Despite the marginal size of intra-African trade, its effect on employment is greater than that of extra-African exports. Our results also show that intra-African exports of primary products create jobs in the agricultural sector, while its effect on employment in the two other sectors is not statistically significant. African countries should therefore increase employment through higher processing of primary products.

Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries recorded impressive economic growth in the last two decades. The question however is, how inclusive and sustainable is this growth? With this in mind, this study examined the sustainability and inclusiveness of economic growth in a panel of 44 SSA countries, over a period of 38 years, while taking into account the diversity of the continent's institutional quality, income growth and resource endowment. The study adopts the innovative nonlinear fiscal reaction function and the dynamic panel threshold model to account for potential asymmetric phenomena in public debt series. The study also adopts Driscoll and Kraay's estimator to account for cross-section dependency and cross-country heterogeneity. The result shows that the recent increase in the economic growth rate in SSA is not sustainable and inclusive. This is tenable since if economic growth is debt induced, more money will be spent on servicing public debt, thus depriving governments of funds for critical intervention programs. Lastly, the study found a public debt/gross domestic product ratio threshold of 34% beyond which public debt impairs growth inclusiveness across SSA. The research and policy implications are discussed.

Existing studies have investigated the impact of oil price risk (OPR) on firms' stock returns (FSRs) at the aggregate level; little attention has been devoted to firms' stock returns (FSRs) given the firm's size. This study was designed to investigate the effects of OPR on FSRs while considering the sizes of these firms in Nigeria. A nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag econometric model that captures OPR (positive and negative oil price change) was explored, in which short-run and long-run nonlinearities are estimated in both symmetric and asymmetric models. One hundred firms in the Nigeria Stock Exchange were partitioned into four quartiles using their market capitalization. The results showed that a positive OPR increased stock returns in the first quartile, third quartile and fourth quartile while anegative OPR reduced the returns in the first quartile, but the second, third and fourth quartile stock returns gained in the long-run. Generally, the quartiles responded to asymmetric oil price change. The OPR had differential impacts on stock returns depending on the size of the firm in Nigeria but negative OPR impacts most capitalized firms more.

This paper investigates the impact of the sectoral reallocation of labor on unemployment in Morocco. Using the Lilien index for job reallocation, we estimate an autoregressive distributed lag model using quarterly data between 2001 and 2019. The analysis yielded two key findings. In the short run, job reallocation raises unemployment, which can be attributed to the inadequacy of the quantity of newly created jobs in the emerging sectors, the mismatch between the actual and the needed skills of the workforce, and the costs of job search. In the long run, job reallocation reduces unemployment as the emerging sectors develop and the workforce adapts to the changes in the labor market. Policymakers should design strategies that accelerate the adaptation of labor supply to the needs of emerging sectors and reduce transitional unemployment. Public policy should focus on identifying and developing emerging and labor-intensive sectors that can absorb the surplus of skilled and unskilled labor.

This paper examines whether technological innovations such as information and communication technology infrastructure, mobile phone subscriptions, secure internet servers and the number of automated teller machines and bank branches increased financial deepening in 43 African countries for the period 2010–2019. The study employs panel corrected standard errors, fixed effects and quantile regressions for empirical analysis. The results show that technological innovations have a positive and significant influence on financial deepening in Africa in terms of banks’ mobilisation of deposits and allocation of credit to enterprises. Furthermore, the technological indicators have a strong and positive effect on higher levels of bank credit to the private sector than lower levels. As for bank deposits, only the number of branches was found to have significant and positive effects at a high level of bank deposits compared with a low level. These results imply that African governments and development partners can leverage ICT developments to increase financial deepening and reinvigorate debt financing, which is the primary funding source for small and medium-size enterprises.