ABSTRACT This study set out to examine the effect of sovereign rating on funding cost and profitability of banks in Africa. Using over 300 banks operating in Africa from 2006 to 2012, the study investigates sovereign ratings‟ impact on bank profitability and funding cost. The long term domestic sovereign ratings announced by Fitch and Standard & Poor‟s during the period under study were used. The regressions were estimated using Prais-Winsten and the Generalized Method of Moments estimati...
The aim of this study is to investigate the nexus between financial inclusion, financial literacy and inclusive growth in Africa. The study uses a modified version of Sarma (2008) approach to compute an index of financial inclusion and inclusive growth. The system-generalized methods of moments is employed to analyze the link between financial inclusion and inclusive growth. Ordinary Least Squares with robust standard errors is employed to investigate the link between financial literacy ...
This study aimed at finding the effect of financial access and other potential determinants on productivity of firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Data was sourced from the World Bank‟s Enterprise Survey for 2,830 manufacturing firms collected over the period 2003 – 2014. With the aid of the Semi-parametric approach by Levinsohn and Petrin which uses intermediate inputs to proxy for unobservable productivity shocks, total factor productivity was estimated and regressed on several variables ...
As firms go about their operations and expand their activities, the retained earnings of the firm might prove insufficient to support its activities. Firms are forced to look for external finance and the ordeal lies with how to raise the needed funds. A financial contract design for small firms is chosen on the basis of the financial characteristics of the firm, the entrepreneur, the firm’s prospects and the associated information problems (Berger & Udell, 1998). Broadly, these factors...
ABSTRACT Public Management reforms in public sector accountancy, more specifically, the adoption of accrual basis IPSAS is considered a relevant improvement to the cash basis of accounting since it enables comprehensive reporting on financial transactions of the public sector.This study examines the roles of public sector accountants in the adoption of accrual basis IPSAS in the public sector. Particularly, the study attempts to provide the roles of public sector accountants in the acc...
ABSTRACT The aim of the study was to assess the three-tier pension schemes in Ghana. Specifically, the study examined the standards of the mandatory tier one and tier two pension schemes in Ghana; evaluated the current voluntary tier-three pension scheme in Ghana, and examined the relationship between the benefits of pensions schemes, and an assessment of the three-tier pension scheme to the Ghanaian worker. A cross-sectional survey research strategy, coupled with a quantitative methodologica...
ABSTRACT The study examines how increasing the shares of fees and commissions, trading income and total non-interest income makes African banks more risky, for banks that specialize in either retail or investment banking activities. The study used financial information obtained from the Bankscope database to construct a panel of African banks from 2008 to 2012. The study used the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression model with Newey – West standard errors, robust for heteroskedascity and ...
ABSTRACT The recent worldwide competition for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and African’s poor show in FDI attraction is the main motivation of this study. The study primarily investigates the impact of infrastructure development and ease of doing business on FDI in Africa. This study uses 52 African countries for the period 2010-2014. The system Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimation technique, a dynamic panel regression technique, is employed for this analysis because of the sm...
ABSTRACT Global flows of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) have seen a boom in the last two decades. This is evident in the annual United Nations’ Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) investment reports. Notwithstanding this, Africa remains the least recipient of global FDI and its share continues to decline. Africa’s predicament has been explained variously. One reason is that Africa is considered unsafe for foreign investments. Proponents of this conjecture base their arguments on...
ABSTRACT The study aimed at estimating the threshold effects of public debt on economic growth within Africa using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), Distributed Lag (DL), Cross-sectionally augmented ARDL, and the Cross-sectionally augmented CS-DL models. The study also looked at the long-run effects of increasing public debt growth on economic growth. The study employed data from the Historical Public Debt Database (HPDD) and the International Financial Statistics (IFS) of the Intern...
ABSTRACT Securing adequate financing for oil and gas investments is a difficult task in the best of environments. In Africa, the task is more difficult on account of political, commercial and force majeure risks. These factors serve to limit the interest of international commercial banks, the main source of oil and gas finance in making long-term credit available for the region. This thesis examines the risk mitigation arrangements that can relief the fears of the international financial ins...
ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to construct a composite optimal risky portfolio across eleven African countries from which optimal portfolio decisions can be made by investors. This is done through a static model. The study further assesses how robust the optimal portfolio is to possible variations in economic conditions of a country through the use of a bootstrap algorithm. This, therefore, makes the optimal choices of this study reliable and robust to non-normality biases. The variou...
ABSTRACT This paper examines the climate change effect on inclusive growth and the possible moderating role of adaptive capacity in climate change/inclusive growth in the long and short-run. The study employs temperature change anomalies (with 1951-1980 as the baseline climatological year) and CO2 emissions (metric ton per capita) as variables for climate change and a set of variables as indicators to measure inclusive growth. These set of indicators are adopted from the Asian Development Ban...
ABSTRACT The study examines the determinants of liquidity risk of Ghanaian banks and how it affects their profitability. Theory on the effects of liquidity risk on bank profitability is mixed; while some studies conclude that high liquidity risk increases bank profitability through high net interest margins, others indicate that it reduces profitability due to the high cost associated with securing funding at such times. With an unbalanced data set of 22 banks over a 10 year period spanning ...
ABSTRACT The objective of this research was to assess the explanatory power of Book-To-Market value of equity ratio (BTM) and firm size on portfolio returns in Ghana. This study also sought to compare the strength of BTM to size in explaining returns. The last objective was to measure the efficiency of Fama and French (1992) Three-Factor Model on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) over the period January 1997 to December 2009 and to compare the Three-Factor Model to the Capital Asset Pricing Mod...