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This paper aims to analyse economic growth in Africa focussing on the role of digitalization and financial sector development.

The authors employ country-level data from 36 African countries over the period 2000–2020 and used fixed effect, random effect and the Hausman–Taylor estimation techniques.

The study, first finds that, digitalization propels financial sector development in Africa. Building on this, the study further finds that, digitalization conditioned on financial sector development at best does not promote economic growth in Africa. However, results of the net effects suggest that digitalization, overall, improve economic growth in Africa.

In the current environment of a sluggish global economy, digitalization can play an important role in assisting policymakers to spur economic growth. This has attracted the attention of many researchers in the developed world. However, little is done about the subject matter in Africa.

The findings of this paper are novel in the African sub-region with important policy implications.

The purpose of this paper is to understand both the incidence and the impact of the African political business cycle (PBC) in the light of a literature which has argued that, with major extensions of democracy since the 1990s, the cycle has both become more intense and has made African political systems more fragile. It answers two very important macroeconomic questions crucial to the validity of the opportunistic model. It, first, answers the question of whether election cycles contribute to money growth in the light of government expenditure, and second, whether election cycles have an effect on economic growth in the light of money supply.

The study employs data from 39 African countries from 1990 to 2014 to address these important empirical questions using panel regression techniques.

The paper found PBC to be present in Africa. It also found that such cycles do not translate to economic performance in African countries. The paper therefore indicates the need for African policy makers to take measures to eliminate or lessen the scale of PBCs.

There are many ways in which today’s political choices affect future well-being. Recently, economists have concluded that we pass on the inflationary (or deflationary) consequences of current policies to the future generation.

This paper is unique in its approach to investigate the objectives.