Should Africa promote stock market capitalism?

This paper considers the pros and cons of establishing stock markets in sub-Saharan African economies at the present stage of their development. It provides theoretical analysis and empirical evidence from both developing and advanced countries to argue that for many African countries such a development would be a costly irrelevance which they can ill afford; for a number of others, it is likely to do more harm than good. The African countries would do better to use their scarce human, material, and institutional resources to improve their banking systems than to promote stock markets. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.