Africa lags behind other regions in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). In some circumstances, there are obvious explanations for the absence of FDI, such as a high incidence of war. In this paper, we examine the role that monetary and exchange rate policy may have played in explaining...

This paper uses a data set of over two hundred years of sovereign debt, banking and inflation crises to explore the question of how long it takes a country to "graduate" from the typical pattern of serial crisis that most emerging markets experience. We find that for default and inflation...

Over the 21st century, and especially since 2014, global exchange rate volatility has been trending downwards, notably among the core G3 currencies (dollar, euro and the yen), and to some extent the G4 (including China). This stability continued through the Covid-19 recession to date: unusual,...