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"In 2019, African heads of state and governments launched in fanfare the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), a historic agreement for economic transformation across the continent. But now comes the hard bit: how to make the agreement a success? In this book, senior experts from across the world come together to provide a comprehensive analysis of the conditions needed for AfCFTA to successfully spur economic development in Africa. It puts forward three foundations for success: demography dividend, digital economy, and economic diversification. In addition to trade policy, the book recommends that African policymakers should strengthen fiscal and monetary policy coordination, adopt and implement the appropriate regulatory environment, and build suitable connectivity infrastructure. The stakes are high. If implemented correctly, the book argues that AfCFTA could speed up trade within Africa, which could double every five years. Success would mean growth, investment, changing trade patterns, jobs, economic transformation, poverty reduction, and a continental market for services. Driven by concrete, evidence-based strategies for long-term growth, this book is an essential read for policy makers, development practitioners, economics researchers, and everyone with an interest in the future of Africa"--

AbstractApplying panel threshold regression technics along with alternative econometric investigation on a panel database of 48 sub‐Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 2000–2012, this paper analyzes the structure of housing finance in SSA countries and mainly verifies if there is a threshold effect on shared prosperity. Independently of the method used, our findings offer strong evidence of an inverted U‐shaped relationship between housing finance and inequality. The current level of development of housing finance in SSA, which is at its very early stage, is not yet an effective tool for reducing economic inequality; however, beyond a given threshold, housing finance becomes effective in reducing inequality. Indeed, higher values of housing finance depth above a certain threshold of 6.35% reduce inequality, whereas values below 6.35% and very high values have no significant impact. In addition, there is a slightly positive relationship between housing finance and labor productivity growth in SSA. Results also show that the way housing finance impact inequality is highly dependent on their ability to implement effective crisis fight policies. Controlling for countries' income levels, legal origin, and regional proximity revealed relative benchmarking, typology, and characteristics of SSA housing finance. These findings suggest some policies to stimulate the development of housing finance in SSA. As a bonus, this paper also highlights several other pillars that can be used to support shared prosperity in SSA.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted Chad's economic recovery, which started in 2018. GDP contracted by 0.9 percent in 2020. Agriculture and the oil sector remained the main drivers of growth, contributing 1.1 percentage points, while services contracted (contributing -2.0 percent). The impact of containment measures on domestic supply chains pushed up prices, and inflation rose from -1.0 percent in 2019 to 3.5 percent in 2020. Both the fiscal and current account balances deteriorated substantially, and difficulties in financing fiscal deficit may have led to further domestic arrears' buildup. Given the lack of fiscal space and large financing requirements, bold actions are needed. In this regard, the government could first strengthen economic diversification to enlarge the fiscal base, by removing bottlenecks to livestock exports, adopting business-friendly reform to support the private sector, and strengthening fiscal administration and policy for better revenue collection. Second, the government could improve its spending efficiency to deliver quality service under declining resources by enhancing the selection process, the planning and designing of investment projects, and improving public spending efficiency in health and education. Finally, the government should improve debt sustainability by strengthening its management and transparency.

This paper explores the landscape, contributions, and determinants of sovereign wealth funds' long-term investments in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study finds that of all regions, Africa receives the lowest share of investment from sovereign wealth funds, and the landscape is dominated by Asian funds. The investment strategies of sovereign wealth funds established by African countries tend to be to invest less domestically and more abroad, contrary to Asian funds. In addition, using an enriched simple mean-variance portfolio model with an exponential utility function, the analysis shows that the investment rate of return and political connections have a positive and significant effect on sovereign wealth fund investments, and risk exerts a negative but not significant effect. The paper confirms these results empirically, using a database that includes 26 sovereign wealth fund investments over 1985-2013. Hence, sovereign wealth funds investing in Africa care more about high returns and the political interests of their country of origin than the risk of their investment.

Using data from the Global Financial Inclusion database (Global Findex) of the World Bank, this study attempts to identify and analyse the determinants of financial inclusion in Central and West Africa, two of the least financial inclusive regions of the Africa continent. The findings indicate that access to formal finance in the two regions is mainly driven by individual characteristics such as gender, education, age, income, residence area, employment status, marital status, household size and degree of trust in financial institutions. However, Central Africa and West Africa differ with the entire Africa region on a number of important determinants of access to finance. Specifically, educated, working-age, urban resident and full-time employed are significant individual characteristics of access to formal account in both regions and in Africa. However, being male and/or married are positive determinants of financial inclusion for Central Africa and Africa, whereas income is significant in West Africa and Africa. In addition, household size has a negative impact on account ownership in West African and not in Central Africa. When we use the other financial inclusion indicators (saving, borrowing or frequency of use), the above determinants remain all significant for Africa, but not necessarily for Central Africa or West Africa, where they have different degree of significance. As policy recommendations, governments and their partners in these regions should adopt or strengthen regulatory laws to better protect financial services consumers, enlarge population access to education, ease access to finance for the vulnerable groups (women, youth, poor, etc.), and continue their effort to increase the number of permanent and stable jobs created with special focus on gender and marital status in Central Africa and income and household size in West Africa.