Cheikh Anta Gueye

Managing Volatile Capital Flows: Experiences and Lessons for Sub-Saharan African Frontier Markets

During the past three years the frontier markets of sub-Saharan Africa have received growing amounts of portfolio capital flows, with heightened interest from foreign investors. Compared with foreign direct investment, portfolio capital flows tend to be more volatile, and thus pose challenges for sub-Saharan African frontier markets. This study examines the evolution of capital flows since 2010 and discusses the policies these countries have designed to reduce risks from the inherent volatility of these flows.

U.S. Interest Rates and Emerging Market BondYield Spreads: A Changing Relationship?

The empirical evidence on the impact of international interest rates on emerging market (EM) bond spreads is mixed. In this article, we closely examine the 2000–2009 period and find a negative relationship between U.S. interest rates and EM bond spreads. We argue that the relationship between U.S. short rates and EM bond spreads is unstable and can change depending on how other “push” and “pull” factors, such as investors’ appetite for risk and emerging markets’ economic fundamentals, interact.

Growth in Africa Under Peace and Market Reforms

Economic stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has led several economists to question the region’s ability to attain sustained economic growth, some of them arguing for the need to shift away from natural resource - based exports. Yet, we find that low growth has not been common to all SSA countries and that those that achieved political stability and significantly liberalized their economies experienced high growth in income per capita, as high as ASEAN-5 countries. This group of SSA countries attained high growth while maintaining their specialization in natural resource exports. Our analysis also rejects the hypothesis of reverse causality: that good growth performance allowed countries to attain political stability or liberalize their economies.

Do Resource Windfalls Improve the Standard of Living in Sub-Saharan African Countries?; Evidence from a Panel of Countries

We examine the impact of resource windfall on the standard of living both in the short-run and long-run, using a sample of 130 countries, 1963-2007. Then, we systematically investigate the effect of resource windfall on welfare in three different groups of countries: We find that in the short-run resource windfall is welfare enhancing in the whole sample, especially via increases in income and decreases in inequality. However, in SSA countries, the size of welfare improvement is small and it is smaller and almost zero after one year in fragile Sub-Saharan Arican (SSA) countries. In the whole sample, a resource windfall shock leads to significant welfare growth even in the long-run, but we couldn’t find any significant long-run effect of resource windfall in SSA countries.