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This paper investigates whether democracy plays a mediating role in the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The empirical analysis is conducted using fixed effects and system GMM (Generalised Method of Moments) on a panel of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries covering the period of 1990–2018.

The results find that FDI has no direct effect on inequality whereas democracy reduces inequality directly in both the short run and the long run. The sensitivity analyses find that democracy improves equality regardless of the magnitude of FDI, resource endowment or democratic deepening whereas FDI only reduces inequality once a moderate level of democracy has been achieved.

The results discussed above thus have four policy implications. First, these results show that although democracy has inequality reducing benefits, SSA is unlikely to significantly reduce inequality unless the region purposefully diversifies its trade and FDI away from natural resources. Second, the region should continue to expand credit access to reduce inequality and attract FDI. Third, policymakers should undertake reforms that will reduce youth inequality. Lastly, the region should focus on long-run democratic reforms rather than on short-run democratization to improve governance and investor confidence.

Although there are existing studies that examine the association between FDI and inequality, FDI and democracy and democracy and inequality, this is the first study to explicitly examine the effect of democracy on the association between FDI and inequality in SSA, and the first study to separately consider the possible varied effects of contemporaneous democratization versus the long-run accumulation of democratic capital. In addition, rather than measure inequality by income alone, this study uses the more appropriate Human Development Index to account for SSA's sociological, education and income disparities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the Goods and Service Tax (GST) implementation on Malaysian stock market index.

This study used daily closing prices of the Malaysian stock index and futures markets for the period ranging from June 2009 to November 2016. Empirical estimation is based on the generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (1, 1) model for pre- and post-announcement of the GST.

Result shows that volatility of Malaysian stock market index increases in the post-announcement than in the pre-announcement of the GST which indicates that educative programs employed by the government before the GST announcement did not yield meaningful result. The volatility of the Malaysian stock market index is persistent during the GST announcement and highly persistent after the implementation. Noticeable increase in post-announcement is in support with the expectation of the market about GST policy in Malaysia.

The finding of this study is consistent with expectation of the market that GST policy will increase the price of the goods and services and might reduce standard of living. This is supported by a noticeable increase in the volatility of the Malaysian stock market index in the post-announcement of GST which is empirically shown during the announcement and after the implementation of GST. Although the GST announcement could be classified as a scheduled announcement, unwillingness to accept the policy prevails in the market as shown by the increase in the market volatility.

Past studies on Malaysian stock market index volatility focus on the impact of Asian and global financial crisis whereas this study examines the impact of the GST announcement and implementation on the volatility of the Malaysian stock market index.