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We examine how the degree of regional financial integration in African stock markets has evolved over the last eleven years. Despite increasing regional economic cooperation, the process of stock market integration has been slow. To facilitate growth via developed financial markets but keep financial stability risk at a minimum, further regional integration should be promoted, and mild capital controls on non-African investors may be necessary. A Diebold-Yilmaz spillover analysis is applied to ten African stock markets for the period between August 2004 and January 2015. We examine spillovers among four regions and among individual countries. Regional integration, as measured by total spillovers in Africa, is increasing but remains very low. These spillovers were temporarily heightened during the global financial crisis. Cross-regional spillovers are high between Northern and Southern Africa. Asymmetric capital controls on African and non-African investors must be considered to foster further regional integration and to mitigate financial stability risk. This is one of the few studies to address the construction of the future architecture of regionally integrated stock markets in emerging countries.

Japanese women’s life courses have changed dramatically in recent history. Yet, transformation of the meanings and experiences of childlessness did not follow a linear, one-dimensional path. Childlessness in Japan today – strongly influenced by Western, modern education after the World War II – can indeed be interpreted as a form of liberation from a restrictively gendered life-course. However, in Japan’s pre-modern period, there were in fact alternative paths available for women to remain childless. As Japan became nationalised and the meanings of Japanese womanhood shifted, childlessness became increasingly stigmatised and notably, stigmatised across social classes.

This chapter provides concise accounts of the social meanings of marriage and fertility from the Tokugawa period through the Meiji period and continues with analysis of pressures faced by contemporary Japanese women who are childless. Also highlighted are the particular socio-demographic contexts which have brought involuntary childlessness, too, into the realms of public discussion and expected action on the part of the government. Through its account of the Japanese context, this chapter emphasises the larger theoretical, sociological argument that the historically placed social construction of childlessness – and thus, of the experiences and identities of childless women – always occurs through particular intersections of cultural, political-economic and demographic conditions.