我国对非洲地区石油投资环境分析

非洲地区是近年来各国石油海外投资的重点地区,对于非洲地区石油投资环境的研究,有利于我国选择合适的投资区位,尽可能多的获得经济效益。本文在立足前人对投资环境分析的基础上,对非洲的石油投资环境进行了综合评价,并给出了投资环境最优的国家。     

Governance infrastructure and indebtedness of African countries: Do regional blocs matter?

Motivated by the intermediating role of good institutions in enabling growth via external debt financed investment and the touted promise of regional integration for Africa's growth prospect, we use data on 37 countries, over the period 2002–2010, to explore the governance institutions—external indebtedness nexus in Africa, at the regional bloc level. We find a robust negative relation between governance institutions and external indebtedness in East & Horn of Africa, Central Africa and Southern Africa; and unclear relationships in North and West Africa regions. Importantly, these baseline results are robust to the consideration of debt write-offs, natural resource rents, and endogeneity. Further, we find that geographic, economic and cultural factors of proximity, intra-regional activity, shared official language, legal origin and dominant religion, largely explain the commonality of Africa's regional blocs of countries. These and other results of the study can support potential external debt management strategy that leverages effective governance institutions and enhanced regional economic integration.     

Panel cointegration,quantile regressions,asymmetric adjustments and crises: The case of EU current accounts

This paper investigates the relationships between the current account and several fundamentals, including the real exchange rate, government consumption, investment, openness, terms of trade and real income in the EU28 group of countries. A main feature of the study is that we also assess the relationships for two subgroups, the EU15 + Cyprus and Malta, and the CEECs. Using data spanning the period between 1995q1 and 2019q2, we identify similarities and differences between the responses in these two subgroups, which are obscured when an aggregate study of the EU28 is conducted, rather than sub-groups. Our results suggest that, in assessing the current account for economic blocs, an a priori assumption of similar relationships for member countries may be misplaced.     

Quantifying China’s financial reach up through the pandemic: The African experience

This study seeks to quantify the financial connections between China and Africa. China’s increasing investments in Africa have inevitably strengthened the relationship between China and the majority of African countries over the past decade. We find consistent effects of the Shanghai Industrial Index on African stock markets together with some evidence that these relationships strengthened following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Markov-Switching analysis affirms these connections while also identifying intensifying effects as we move from periods of low market volatility to periods of high volatility. The African stock markets included in the sample encompass Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.     

Private and public investment in sub-Saharan Africa: The role of instability risks

This paper explores the impact of public investment on private investment in sub-Saharan Africa using the finite mixture model. We argue that the impact of public investment on private investment differs across groups of countries with similar but unobserved characteristics. Contrary to previous studies, the paper incorporates the potential presence of hidden heterogeneity and tries to explain the group membership. Using a sample of 42 countries, we find that the impact of public investment on private investment differs across three different groups of countries. Moreover, we find that countries with high risk of conflict, terrorism and repatriation of profits are less likely to be in the group where public investment crowds in private investment. The paper underscores the need for sub-Saharan African countries to ensure private investment security by reducing the risks associated with conflicts and terrorism, and preserving contract viability and repatriation of profits.     

Financial development,portfolio investments and the real economy in Africa

According to the conservative view, capital flows enhance economic growth. Focussing on Africa’s real economy, this study investigates the linkage between portfolio investments and real sector growth, and whether financial sector development strengthens this association. The study covers 30 countries over the period 1990–2017. We adopt the Lewbel instrumental variable general method of moments (IV-GMM) two-step robust estimator, which relies on heteroscedasticity for identification, while dealing with instrument insufficiency, unavailability, endogeneity and omitted variable bias. We found that portfolio equity has no growth impact on Africa’s real sector. Debt flows deter the growth of the overall real sector as well as the manufacturing and industrial sectors, but have no impact on agriculture and service growth. We found that financial development does strengthen the positive association between capital flows and economic growth, but this is dependent on the type of sector and portfolio investment, as well as on the degree of financial development. We control for known determinants of economic growth.     

Cointegration in a macroeconomic system

This paper investigates the long-run relationships within a set of six quarterly time-series on the Austrian economy by means of cointegration. After analysing the univariate properties, especially with respect to the appropriate seasonal filter, the maximum-likelihood method proposed by Johansen (1988) is applied to estimate and test the cointegrating relationships. We found three such relations, implying that the system is driven by three independent stochastic time trends. In a next stage we investigate whether the empirically determined cointegrating relationships are compatible with implications derived from the neoclassical growth model with exogenous stochastic technical progress. It is found that the Austrian data strongly reject the propositions that the real interest rate and the log ratios of consumption to output, investment to output, and the real gross wage sum to output are stationary.     

Investment in Africa's Manufacturing Sector: A Four Country Panel Data Analysis

Firm level data for the manufacturing sector in Africa, presented in this paper, shows very low levels of investment. The importance of profit effects on investment is investigated using a flexible accelerator, a specification based on the Euler equation and a simple generalisation of these specificiations. There are controls for firm fixed effects. It is shown that the profit effect is very similar for both the accelerator and Euler equation specifications. A comparison with other studies shows that, for small firms, the effect is much smaller in Africa than for other countries. Reasons for the relative insensitivity of investment to profits in African firms are suggested. For the most general specification tested there are no significant differences in the size of the profit effect across the four countries in the study.     

Human Resource Management in Africa: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Africa is not a dream but in many ways, human resource management (HRM) in Africa could be a dreamlike experience. This appearance of managing in Africa as being surreal is particularly evident with many Western human resource managers. The sheer complexity and diversity found there can make the HRM process one of the more vexing decisions that management may have to undertake when doing business in Africa. In an effort to dramatize the complex nature of HRM decisions in African context, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland will be used as a metaphor throughout the paper. Just as Wonderland held many surprises for Alice during her adventure, Africa holds many surprises for Western HRM, not only in the form of the alien nature of the 'rules, regulations and laws' of many African nations but also in the extent to which many African organizations/employees ignore or bend the rules It is the intent of this paper to demonstrate a means to develop a classification scheme from which categories of African countries can evolve into more or less homogeneous groupings. These categories can then be used to develop customized HRM policies, strategies and tactics. The classification schema is based upon the European colonization of Africa, the history of leadership in African nations since decolonization, the economic/infrastructure development differences among African economies and the cultural differences among these same countries. It is envisioned that the African HRM decision matrix could provide the basis for making 'informed' HRM decisions by Western managers in an African context, although these Western managers must always be ever mindful of the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland nature of the HRM in Africa.     

An empirical test of the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis: Evidence from eight middle-income countries in Africa

The paper tests the validity of the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis (BSH) using the within-effects and the dynamic panel generalised methods of moment (GMM) techniques for a panel of eight middle-income African countries over the period 1960–2009. We selected these countries because they exhibited a mixture of relative productivity growth and real exchange rate misalignment that fits the characterization of the BSH well. The results strongly support the BSH for this group of countries. The results are valid even after we controlled for potentially omitted variables and endogeneity. The implication is that as these countries become more productive, their currencies appreciate in real terms.     

The effect of exchange rate volatility on U.S. bilateral trade with Africa: A symmetric and asymmetric analysis

The impact of exchange rate volatility on U.S. trade with the world or on U.S. trade with major partners has been assessed by many researchers, but none have considered the case of U.S. trade with African nations. We fill this gap by assessing the symmetric and asymmetric impact of the real bilateral exchange rate volatility between the U.S. dollar and each African partner’s currency on the U.S. trade flows with each of the 20 partners from Africa. We found asymmetric short-run effects of exchange rate volatility on almost all U.S. exports to and imports from each of the 20 countries. In addition, significant long-run asymmetric effects were discovered in the case of U.S. exports to 15 countries and U.S. imports from 12 countries. Our findings are partner-specific.     

Obstfeld and Rogoff׳s international macro puzzles: a quantitative assessment

Obstfeld and Rogoff (2001) propose that trade frictions lie behind key puzzles in international macroeconomics. We take a dynamic multicountry model of international trade, production, and investment to data from 19 countries to assess this proposition quantitatively. Using the framework developed in Eaton et al. (2016), we revisit the puzzles in a counterfactual world without trade frictions in manufactures. Removing these trade frictions goes a long way toward resolving a number of puzzles. The dependence of domestic investment on domestic saving falls by half or disappears entirely, mitigating the Feldstein and Horioka (1980) puzzle. Changes in nominal GDPs in U.S. dollars become less variable across countries and line up with changes in real GDPs as much as with real exchange rates, mitigating the exchange rate disconnect puzzle. Less dramatically, changes in consumption become more correlated across countries, mitigating the consumption correlations puzzle and changes in real exchange rates become less variable across countries, mitigating the relative purchasing power parity puzzle.     

Foreign banks and short-term macroeconomic fluctuations: Do financial development and regions matter?

In this paper, we investigate the association between bank integration, measured with the share of foreign banks in the banking industry, and macroeconomic volatility in emerging economies. We find a negative and significant relationship between bank integration and short-run fluctuations in output, consumption and investment, controlling for financial development, bank concentration and the real effective exchange rate. However, this relationship is found to be positive at high levels of financial development. We also explore the association at the regional level and show that the presence of foreign banks in Latin America is negatively and significantly correlated with macroeconomic volatility both in normal times and times of crisis. Despite widespread concerns in emerging Europe, which experienced greater financial vulnerability during the global financial crisis, we find no significant association between growth volatilities and bank integration.     

Monetary policy credibility: A Phillips curve view

The paper investigates the presence of monetary policy credibility in eight countries by filtering the residuals from an “augmented” Phillips curve. Two of the eight countries (US and New Zealand) exhibit robust credibility effects across samples. Two countries (South Africa and the UK) exhibit credibility effects in the sample involving the 1990s, but these effects disappear in the sample beginning in 2000. The rest of the countries do not exhibit monetary policy credibility. Given that seven of the eight countries have adopted an explicit inflation-targeting framework, we conclude that there is very weak evidence that this framework enhances monetary policy credibility. These results are however sensitive to how inflation and the output gap are measured.     

International market selection strategies of manufacturing and services firms

This paper discusses the entrepreneurial landscape in Africa and locates a new generation of African entrepreneurs and their business networks within it. Unlike others in that landscape (i.e. micro- or small-scale informal sector vendors, and traditional or multinational large-scale formal sector firms), the ‘new generation’ entrepreneurs are business globalists who organized a system of business enterprise networks consisting of national, regional, and pan-African organizations. The study analyses interview data from 57 men and women network members from 10 countries (Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). Some defining characteristics of these entrepreneurs are interactive social and business relationships, use of modern management methods and information technology, trust among fellow members, transparent business practices, advocacy on behalf of the private sector, and commitment to increasing intra-African commerce. Their mission is to improve the climate for private sector business in Africa and to promote regional economic integration. They pursue cross-national commercial ventures, maintain official observer status at established regional economic organizations, sign memoranda of understanding with multilateral agencies, establish venture capital funds, and help to change government policies. The paper identifies characteristics of the ‘new generation’ entrepreneurs, evaluates goals and achievements of their networks, and concludes that despite limitations, these entrepreneurs and their organizations have created intra- and cross-national networks that strengthen private-sector-led economic growth in Africa.     

Macroeconomic shocks and fluctuations in African economies

We estimate a monetary DSGE model to examine the role of macroeconomic shocks in generating fluctuations in ten African countries. The model is estimated with the Bayesian technique using twelve macroeconomic variables. The findings indicate that both the internal and external shocks significantly influence output fluctuations in African economies. Over a four quarter horizon, internal shocks are dominant and over eight to sixteen quarter horizons, external shocks are dominant. Among the external shocks, external debt, exchange rate, foreign interest rate and commodity price shocks account for a large part of output variations in African economies. Money supply and productivity shocks are the most important internal shocks contributing to output fluctuations in African countries.     

The opportunity costs of commuting: the value of a commuting satellite account framework with an example from Lisbon Metropolitan Area*

Commuting affects regional and urban economies. It shapes urban areas, defines their relationships with neighboring regions, intensifies economic flows and exacerbates energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper sets out a proposal for an innovative commuting satellite account (CSA), integrated in a multi-regional input–output model. This framework combines commuting activities with regional distribution of income, distinct household consumption structures, real estate renting activities and the energy consumption and environmental flows incorporated in the different industries. To assess the opportunity costs of commuting, the CSA framework is applied to the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The socio-economic-environmental impacts of a scenario in which commuters become non-commuters by moving their residence to the municipality in which they work are estimated. The analysis indicates that: commuting, in general, induces significant economic and environmental opportunity costs. Finally, the adoption of policy-oriented recommendations contributing to limit sprawling in metropolitan regions is discussed.     

FINANCIAL LIBERALIZATION IN SUB‐SAHARAN AFRICA: WHAT DO WE KNOW?

Abstract Beginning from the early 1980s countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa embarked on financial liberalization policies with a view to reversing the ill‐effects of financial repression. This paper provides a survey of financial liberalization in Sub‐Saharan African countries over the period 1980 to 2004. Our review of empirical studies showed that financial liberalization has had diverse and contrasting effects on savings, investment and economic growth. Most studies found a significant positive effect of financial liberalization on investment whereas its effect on savings has been largely insignificant. The evidence on the effect on economic growth is inconclusive as different studies find contrasting results. It is found that financial liberalization policies have not had the desired and expected results as both financial and macroeconomic variables have not improved following financial liberalization in these countries. This calls for a rethinking of financial liberalization in Sub‐Saharan African countries. It is important that financial liberalization is carried out in a stable macroeconomic environment. In addition to this, there should be a building and reform of institutions and the strengthening of prudential regulation. Following this, financial liberalization can be embarked upon but it must be properly sequenced and not rushed.     

Demography and the U.S. current account deficit

We examine whether aging in the trading partners of the U.S. has affected their demand for foreign (i.e., U.S.) assets enough to materially affect the U.S. current account balance. There is reason to think that demography may be at work in international capital flows because the standard life-cycle model of consumption behavior predicts that a household's age will influence its saving behavior. Moreover, simple national accounting identities link a country's current account balance to its savings–investment imbalance. Thus, differences in national age-profiles should affect the current account. To test this theory's plausibility and significance, I simulate a multi-region overlapping generations model that is calibrated to match the demographic differences among the major industrialized countries over the past 50 years. In the model, it is found that these differences can explain some of the observed long-term capital movements in the G-7. In particular, the model does a good job of predicting the size and timing of U.S. current account deficits.     

International business cycles and risk sharing with uncertainty shocks and recursive preferences

This paper analyzes the effects of output volatility shocks on the dynamics of consumption, trade flows and the real exchange rate, in a two-country, two-good world with consumption home bias, recursive preferences, and complete financial markets. When the risk aversion coefficient exceeds the inverse of the intertemporal substitution elasticity, then an exogenous rise in a country׳s output volatility triggers a wealth transfer to that country, to compensate for the greater riskiness of the country׳s output stream. This risk sharing transfer raises the country׳s consumption, lowers its trade balance and appreciates its real exchange rate. In the recursive preferences framework here, volatility shocks account for a non-negligible share of the fluctuations of net exports, net foreign assets and the real exchange rate. These shocks help to explain the high empirical volatility of the real exchange rate and the disconnect between relative consumption and the real exchange rate.