We develop an empirical representation of inflation in Tanzania for the decade from 2001, estimating ‘multiple-determinant’ single-equation models for month-on-month headline inflation and its principal components (food, energy and core inflation). Our results suggest that while supply-side...

The global financial crisis hasreiterated the need for Africa tobuild resilience to global outputshocks. In this paper we examineempirically the role of intra-regionaland intra-African trade linkages inbeing an absorber of the globaloutput shocks in two Africanregional economic communities....

The main objective of this article is to test the basis of the rumours that have been circulating since late 2011 about the devaluation of the Franc CFA (CFAF). We have used the analyticial framework pioneered by Combes and Plane (2007) and Couharde et al (2011) to calculate the real effective...

An incumbent allocates in period 1 of a two period game, a resource into production, fighting with the challenger, and producing public goods, which impact the probability of winning an election. In period 2 the incumbent may accept the election result, or a coalition or standoff may follow. We...

A fiscally constrained global environment has heightened the interest of development partners in the economic cost of fragility. State fragility and civil war have become a central topic in the development debate and Africa is a continent particularly affected by fragility. A stronger engagement...

This paper compares the effects of contractionary monetary policy and exchange rate appreciation shocks of one standard deviation in size, on the South Africa trade balance using recursive and sign-restriction vector autoregressive models. We find that an exchange rate appreciation shock lowers...

This paper analyzes the determinants of firms exiting the formal sector after registering at start-up. Using a unique and new dataset from four African countries (Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal) with detailed information on firms that have transitioned between formal and informal...

Agricultural sector in Africa has increasingly been the recipient of significant amount of attention from investors, in the form of large scale agribusiness projects, and the concomitant demand for land. Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) such as the African Development Bank (through its...

The East African Community (EAC) economic integration has gained momentum recently, with the EAC countries aiming to adopt a single currency in 2015. This paper evaluates empirically the readiness of the EAC countries for monetary union. First, structural similarity of the EAC countries is...

Using both cross-country and individual level African data, this paper demonstrates that remittance inflows significantly lower the propensity to vote during national elections in Sub-Saharan Africa. This effect is robust to empirical specifications aimed at dealing with the endogeneity of...