Many communities suffer limited public goods provision due to civil servants (doctors, teachers, etc) supplementing their low income with moonlighting activities. Monitors of civil servants commonly also earn low salaries from monitoring and may prefer political contestation for power and...

This study empirically estimates the effect of Africa’s intra-regional trade on the burgeoning youth unemployment in the Continent. We investigate both the aggregate and gender-specific impacts. Our empirical estimates, using available cross-sectional time series data over the period, 1980 and...

This paper estimates an early warning system for predicting systemic banking crises in a sample of low income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the average duration of crises in this sample of countries is longer than one year, the predictive performance of standard binomial logit models is...

Despite recent interest in the interplay between institutions and growth, country studies in developing countries particularly relating to planning has not been given considerable attention. This forms the main motivation for this study, which evaluates the economic planning in Nigeria and...

We investigate the impact of unanticipated United States (US) bond yield increases, federal funds rate tightening, and monetary stimulus shocks on the South African economy using structural VAR models. Firstly, the US monetary stimulus shock leads to weak consumer price inflation, rand-dollar...

We investigate the impact of unanticipated United States (US) bond yield increases, federal funds rate tightening, and monetary stimulus shocks on the South African economy using structural VAR models. Firstly, the US monetary stimulus shock leads to weak consumer price inflation, rand-dollar...

High unemployment and disillusioned youth lie at the basis of the ‘Arab Spring’ which has recently swept through much of the Middle East and Northern Africa. Despite changes in governments, the root problem has not been solved and political leaders, aware of the delicate and potentially...

Over the years, an abundant number of studies have pointed to long delays at project start-up as one of the main impediments to the performance of development operations in Africa. The influence and importance of time delays on project performance emphasizes the need for a systematic effort to...

Financing infrastructure needs in Africa necessitates new thinking on financing mechanisms. This paper is a contribution to the debate on the use of excess foreign exchange reserves from different African countries as one of the funding sources for financing infrastructure. The study has: (i)...