F44

This paper builds a small open economy model for a net commodity exporter to consider financial frictions and monetary policies in order to investigate the main determinants of business cycles. Since we make a distinction to the access of financial markets between the commodity and non-commodity sectors, we notice that as usual, a commodity price shock benefits the competitiveness of the economy and its borrowing terms.

This paper analyses business cycle comovement between African economies and advanced economies. It covers the period 1980 to 2011. The empirical analysis is based on the Dynamic Factor Model applied to annual data for African and G7 countries, covering the period 1980 to 2011. The results indicate that middle-income African countries show consistent business cycle variance shares, both before and after controlling for the influence of the G7.

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 its main trading partners evolves over the periods before and after the 1990s. Moreover, the paper assesses the extent of business cycle synchronization between Africa and the three trading partners during the same periods.