Background
Policy Briefs
Local communities in Africa benefit from protected areas through a number of activities such as grazing their livestock and revenues gained from touristic activities. These two activities are not independent because the feeding habits of large herbivores such as elephants prevent bush encroachment thus maintaining healthy grasslands.. In addition, the way the local community manages the elephants can substantially influence their reproduction.
This study investigates the impact of order flow on the rand/dollar exchange rate over the short and long term. It uses a hybrid model which combines microeconomic and macroeconomic determinants of the exchange rate in the short and long term. The analysis uses monthly series from January 2004 to December 2016. We find that order flow explains movements in the exchange rate, both in the short and in the long term.
This paper examines gender gaps in entrepreneurship in developing and emerging countries through linking entrepreneurship to skills and productivity.
Under-pricing of electricity is prevalent in nearly 70 percent of all sub-Saharan African countries. Consequently, the electricity sectors are financially unviable and unable to maintain or expand the electricity infrastructure, leading to unendurable power deficits and outages in the region.
The perceptions of indigenous people towards protected areas greatly determine the success of integrated conservation and development projects in most 3rd world countries as their perceptions affect their attitude and behaviour towards conservation. Local communities living adjacent to national parks are now viewed as important stakeholders in wildlife conservation in a new development paradigm that seeks to deal with illegal wildlife harvesting.
Zimbabwe’s community-based conservation model, which brings together peasant farmers in a tourism-focused approach to wildlife management, has enjoyed limited success since its inception during the mid-1980s due to a number of reasons.
Like many developing countries, the achievement gap between rural and urban areas in Zambia remains substantial. For example, the share of students scoring well on the Primary School Leaving Examinations (the Grade 7 Examinations) in rural areas is about half what it is in urban areas, according to data from the Examinations Council of Zambia (ECZ).
African countries (including the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries) have recently considered additional robust means of mobilising tax revenue in order to meet revenue targets and consistently provide for the developmental needs of its citizens. For instance, countries have been considering Domestic Resource Mobilisation (DRM) initiatives (as opposed to External Resource Mobilisation - ERM), via improved management of taxation and reduction of tax leakages, in line with the general agenda of enhanced fiscal policy coordination (African Economic Outlook (AEO) 2013). The argument is that DRM would lead to Africa achieving greater economic development, independence and better mobilisation of revenue. Enhanced mobilisation of revenue entails expanding the tax base in these countries by capturing in the tax net, activities not adequately taxed because of policy or administrative weaknesses. Efficient means of taxation could help improve the governments’ revenue positions, reduce public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR), reduce dependency on aid and increase countries’ ownership of their development agenda (including the UN’s post-2015 development agenda or the Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs).
Households headed by women are generally poorer than those headed by men in South Africa. Moreover, the proportion of households headed by women has generally been on the increase in South Africa. While generally declining over the post-apartheid period, poverty has increased in the recent past. In addition South Africa also has very high unemployment rates. A lot has been written on the trends in female headship as well as the relationship between female headship and poverty in South Africa. However, we do not know much about how gendered employment patterns in the household affect the relationship between female headship and poverty in South Africa.
Despite recent political backlash in Europe and the United States, international migration remains a formidable force with wide-ranging consequences in destination and origin countries. The presence of a migrant family member living in a developed country could have multifaceted implications for the welfare of the left behind. In our recent paper we attempt to examine the impacts of international migration on the education of family members left behind in Nigeria. Specifically, we study the net effects of the presence of a migrant family member living in a foreign country on the educational attainment of family members back at home at both secondary and post-secondary levels. We then examine the role of the prospect of future migration, inspired by the presence of a family member abroad, as a potential channel mediating the effect of emigration on family education. By conducting such analysis for Nigeria, the most populous country on the African continent, we hope to shed light on the human capital implications of migration in one of the poorest regions in the world.
The economic costs of bank failures can be substantial, and the resulting reprioritisation of government resources has long-lasting economic, political and social costs. To reduce the cost of failures to taxpayers, recent global regulatory reforms have focused on `burden-sharing arrangements', which aim to share the costs of bank failures between creditors and government. These reforms include `creditor bail-in', a mechanism to write-down the claims of creditors during the bank resolution process. The unintended consequences of bail-in are largely unknown and there are few successful examples.
Following Zimbabwe's economic crisis between 1997 and 2009, a number severe policy reversals from the achievement of reforms and a more competitive manufacturing sector attained through the 1991 to 1995 IMF/World Bank supported Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, were instituted by the country's authorities in their quest to rescue the crisis. These included selective credit, selective foreign exchange allocation and at worst directed marketing of basic commodities at the height of the crisis. These firm and industry specific interventions complemented the already existing crisis induced idiosyncratic shocks on industry and firms.
This experiment contributes to the developing literature on the relationship between inherited-wealth status and effort provision in the labor market. This relationship is of interest beyond the lab the context of continuing national and global concern about intergenerational inequality. Inequality, and differences cultural and class backgrounds may be expected to dominate behavioral differences in South African workplaces and classrooms. This is suggested by lingering racial prejudice and patriarchal attitudes in the labor market and educational institutions. However, this experiment supports the behavioral economics literature that posits that individuals are highly susceptible to framing in ways that augment or mitigate differences in background. This phenomenon occurs even in the brief minutes spent in the artificially constructed context of the laboratory. The implications are profound for the manner in which workplace hierarchies are framed/constructed, and for South African educational institutions, in which the issue of ‘decolonizing’ education is currently being explored.
The role of financial sector development in economic growth has received an extensive attention in the literature. Indeed, a well–developed domestic financial sector such as those of developed countries, can significantly contribute growth by increasing savings and investment, improves technological innovations and efficiently allocates resources. The development of the financial sector entails the institutionalization of policies governing the sector. Financial development in sub–Saharan Africa (SSA) remains low although the sector continues to grow in recent times with the hope that such improvement in the financial sector will enhance economic growth. Extant studies in the literature on finance–growth nexus remain inconclusive and little is also known on the overall effect on growth via the interaction of the real and financial sector. Given the relationship between financial development and economic growth, the central theme of this paper is that the extent to which finance helps growth depends crucially on the simultaneous growth of real and financial sectors. By relying on data spanning 1980–2014 for 29 SSA countries, this paper examines the effect on economic growth when credit growth outstrips the solvency needs of the real sector, and how this impacts on growth. We present crucial findings on the effect of disproportionate sectoral growth rates from the lenses of developing economies. Our evidence resolves the seemingly conflicting and highly contested findings in the finance–growth literature and provides crucial guidance for conducting effective monetary policy aimed at propelling growth.
Follow us on social network