Africa continues to be marginalised in world trade of manufactured goods, despite reductions in tariffs and non-tariff barriers. This paper investigates whether high business and trade costs associated with Africa’s trade-related infrastructure, trade institutions and the regulatory...

Lesotho and other least developed African countries responded impressively to the preferences they were granted under the African Growth and Opportunities Act with a rapid increase in their clothing exports to the US. But this performance has not been accompanied by some of the more dynamic...

Economic transformation is a continuous, long-term process of shifting labour and other resources from lower- to higher-productivity activities both within and between sectors, to facilitate aggregate labour productivity growth over a sustained period and result in more diversified and complex...

Despite Africa’s exceptional FDI performance during the past decade, the majority of FDI inflows have been directed to a few selected countries. As investors face many risks when investing in developing countries, it is argued that risk perception plays a vital role in the FDI inflows...

The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrain investigations into the long-run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in regions such as Africa. Using the reported age of criminals in the Courts of Justice records in the Cape Archive,...

This paper constructs a Good Society Index for 45 African countries, termed the Good African Society Index (GASI). The GASI consists of nine main indexes: (i) economic sustainability, (ii) democracy and freedom, (iii) child well-being, (iv) environment and infrastructure, (v) safety and...

This paper seeks to offer an economic explanation for the emergence of democracy in societies with high income inequality and narrow middle-class such as Apartheid South Africa. The presence of a credible threat of capital flight is shown to render democracy less unpleasant to the elites by...

This paper investigates the causes and consequences of colonial Africa’s first financial crash, which happened in South Africa’s Dutch Cape Colony. The 1788–1793 crisis followed a common sequence of events: trade and fiscal deficits were monetized by printing money, credit...

This paper assesses the extent of trade linkages and shock transmission between African economies and its main trading partners, namely China, Europe and the United States (US). Using the global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model, the paper investigates how shock transmission between Africa and...

This paper examines whether accounting for structural changes in the conditional variance process, through the use of Markov-switching models, improves estimates and forecasts of stock return volatility over those of the more conventional single-state (G)ARCH models, within and across selected...