More than a year after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) deadline, experts and social commentators are divided on the outcome of the goals on poverty reduction. The UN Secretariat and its agencies, while acknowledging that the business of ending poverty is ‘unfinished,’ described the goals ... Read More

This paper revisits the exchange rate-fundamentals debate for the case of the South African Rand; emphasising the role of commodity prices. The exchange rate determination puzzle has been at the heart of exchange rate studies since the Meese-Rogoff (1983) seminal paper. We use floating nominal ex... Read More

Foreign banks play progressively important roles in the banking sector in many developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), foreign ownership of banks is above 50% of the domestic banking sector and given the crucial role banks play in the domestic economy, the effect of their entry is ques... Read More

How can Sub-Saharan Africa consolidate inclusive housing finance development? Conventional urban economic approaches have had limited success for housing finance throughout the region. Community-based funds are a possible alternative to expand accessible and affordable financial services towards ... Read More

This study analyes the impact of exchange rate volatility on Moroccan exports using cointegration and the vector error correction model (VECM) for the period 1998:Q1-2014:Q4. The results obtained are mixed and vary according to the measuring procedure of the volatility that has been used. Our est... Read More

The construction sector in developing countries has propelled economic growth in the most recent period, yet analysis of growth performance has failed to take this into account. This article is a comparative analysis of the relationship between the construction sector and aggregate output for a p... Read More

We evaluate the degree of real exchange rate (REER) misalignment and its macroeconomic implications for the Ghanaian economy using quarterly data (2000Q1-2015Q3). Our results uncovered a clear misalignment of the actual REER from its equilibrium level throughout the sample period, although the RE... Read More

The measurement of quality of life (QoL) can be used as an urban planning tool to address challenges confronting the management of urban centers. The results of such measurements may provide the required basis for formulating future spatial and urban planning policies. Using the city of Kumasi, t... Read More

The dead capital thesis of de Soto has raised a lot of debate on the relationship between formal property titles and access to credit. Various authors have argued that overconcentration of policy efforts on providing formal property titles could be overly simplistic. The argument has largely been... Read More

This paper highlights the impoverishing character of Africa’s economic model in its world merchandise trade. With a view to reduce the ousting of the wealth of the continent by its trading partners, we develop a neo-factorial specialization model in which we introduce technology and raw materials... Read More

Development economics struggles to account for the colonial question in Africa. It typically ignores the colonial question. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard University economist James Robinson try to address this challenge in the book, Why Nations Fail (2012), but they end up simply using... Read More

Professor Panford’s book is serious scholarship on natural resource management. It is one of the few books that will easily garner a lot of attention and be referenced on oil and gas studies in Africa because of its immense contributions. The book has lots of practical lessons for how African cou... Read More