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The purpose of this study is to identify and review strategic government policies on agricultural financing in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. Four factors dictated the choice of these countries. In the first place, the study is set in African emerging markets – and the four countries are the widely acknowledged emerging markets in Africa (Onyiriuba, 2015). Secondly, the spread of the countries, to a large extent, mirrors Africa in general – Egypt and Morocco are in North Africa; Nigeria is a West African country; and, of course, South Africa. Thirdly, other countries in Africa tend to look up to the four countries, apparently as the largest economies in their respective regions. Needless to say, Nigeria alternates with South Africa as the largest economy in Africa. In this capacity, the two countries influence – indeed, mirror – continental Africa's emerging economic progress. Fourthly, lessons from agricultural policy and financing experiences of the four countries will certainly be useful to the other African countries. The specific objective of this paper is to determine how the government seeks to address the financing issues attendant on the risk-laden nature of agriculture through policy interventions. With this end in view, the paper analyses the strategic goals, objectives and beneficiaries of the agriculture financing policies of the government, as well as the constraints on access to finance by the farmers and the policy response.

The study involves a review of empirical literature and government policies on agricultural financing in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. The high risks in agriculture (Onyiriuba, 2015; Mordi, 1988), risk aversion behaviour of banks towards agricultural financing (Onyiriuba, 2015, 1990), and the reluctance of insurers to take on agricultural risks (World Bank, 2018; Federal Republic of Nigeria, 2016; Onyiriuba, 1990; Mordi, 1988) underpin this methodology. There are two other considerations: the needs to find out how government seeks to address the financing issues in agriculture through policy intervention, and to avoid unwieldy research, one that combines government and institutional policy perspectives on agriculture financing. Thus the study is not approached from the perspective of banks and other lending institutions; neither does it combine government and institutional policy perspectives. It rather focuses on government policy in order to properly situate implications of the findings.

The authorities seek to get rid of bottlenecks, ease participation and redress constraints on access to finance in agriculture through policy interventions as a means of sustainable economic growth. The findings are characteristic of emerging markets, rooted in the transitional challenge of opening economies, economic reforms and the March of progress. However, with agriculture and natural resources – rather than industrialisation – as the main stay of their economies, the African emerging markets face an uphill task in their development efforts. This is evident in the divergent and gloomy pictures in which the literature paints their agricultural economies.

Government should gear financing policies to boost output as a means of ensuring food security. It should address risk aversion tendencies among the lenders and feeble credit guarantee, subsidies and budgetary allocations to agriculture. This will ensure effective commitment of the lenders to agriculture and underpin agricultural insurance. However, it demands strengthening links in the chain of access to, and monitoring of, credit for agricultural production. A realistic policy response should target the rural economy – with youth, women and smallholder farmers as ultimate beneficiaries. These actions should be intensified as measures to boost farming and the rural economy.

Current literature fails to situate the empirical findings in emerging markets context, reflecting economies in transition. Besides, in its current state, the literature does not explicitly clarify that agriculture, like most other sectors in such economies, is bound to experience the observed financing constraints. Neither does it clearly reflect how and why the findings should be seen as fleeting realities of the March of progress in transitional economies. This study will help to fill the gap.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corporate performance and social and environmental disclosure for two African leading countries namely, South Africa (common law country) and Morocco (civil law country).

The sample consists of 168 annual reports spanning from 2004 to 2009. A content analysis of companies’ annual reports is used to measure the extent of voluntary social and environmental disclosure.

Results show that social and environmental disclosure has a significant positive effect on corporate performance only in the South African setting.

The findings emphasize the need to explicitly consider the legal and institutional setting prevailing in each context. For instance, social and environmental organizations in South Africa enjoy more power to influence companies’ social and environmental reporting policy, whereas, their counterparts in Morocco, enjoy less power to place pressure on companies to incorporate social and environmental considerations into business operations.

The authors analyse the interactive influence of energy use, capital investment and finance on pollution in energy-dependent African countries.

The study analyses data from 5 selected energy-dependent African nations (i.e. Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco and South Africa) between 1981 and 2020 using the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) approach.

The panel result reveals that capital investment and energy interaction and financial development and capital investment moderation reduce pollution in all the countries. However, for country-specific results, the interaction of investment and energy lowers emissions in Algeria, South Africa, Nigeria and Morocco but increases pollution in Egypt. Similarly, except for Egypt, financial development and capital investment interaction offset pollution in Algeria, Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco.

The limitation of the study stems from the inability to extend the scope to cover the entire African region. However, the fact that the authors selected the most prominent African nations in the sample to enable us to set the template for other smaller nations to follow makes the study tenable in its present form.

Energy-dependent African countries should invest in eco-friendly machines, technologies and equipment to lower pollution vis-à-vis production expansion.

The present research is more expansive by combining the finance and capital investment channels in the quest for decarbonising emerging African nations. Moreover, this is a comparative study, unlike past studies that mainly deploy a one-size-fits-all approach.

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.

The purpose of this study is to critically examine the move to Africanise international investment law (IIL) aimed at promoting sustainable development on the continent.

The study analyses the move by African countries to “Africanise” IIL by incorporating specific and innovative provisions and features in their international investment agreements (IIAs) for the benefit of African economies. This is evidenced by provisions in African regional investment instruments such as the 2007 Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa Investment Agreement and the 2008 Economic Community of West African States Supplementary Act on Investments produced by the different African regional economic communities (RECs), new-generation IIAs such as the 2016 Nigeria-Morocco IIA and the China-Tanzania IIA and the African Union’s Pan-African Investment Code 2016. The common features of these instruments include linking the objective of investment promotion and protection to sustainable development; excluding portfolio investments; including provisions on investor-obligations; and reserving wide scope of regulatory space for host-states, including the ability to take emergency measures without incurring liability to investors. Some of these provisions are rare in IIAs.

The study finds that, while the efforts are commendable, there are real challenges. Firstly, there are inconsistencies in the regimes existing on the continent due to differences in the contents of the international investment instruments promulgated by the different RECs, and also differences in the content of IIAs signed by some member-states of the RECs with countries external to the RECs. Secondly, there are governance gaps and a lack of enforcement in practice, which would undermine the effectiveness of the laws being forged. Thirdly, the Africanised IIL alone would not attract investment if other important determinants, such as critical infrastructure, remain lacking. Fourthly, there is under-representation of Africa in the arbitral institutions that develop and enrich the laws, which, if it continues, would undermine the effectiveness of the Africanisation provisions being included in IIAs.

While the research discusses both law and policy, more is discussed of the law, owing to space limitation.

It is anticipated that this research will impact the content of the investment protocol under the African continental free trade area and beyond and will prompt review of existing and future IIAs by member states of the various RECs to align them for consistency. It is also hoped that this research will impact the review of various investment instruments of the RECs with the aim of harmonising them. It is further hoped that this research would contribute to addressing the challenges that militate against the achievement of the goals of Africanising ILL for sustainable development.

The study is original. It has not been published previously and the authors have found no existing publication that addresses the issues covered in this study.

This study presents the state of green bond markets in Africa and green bond funds by some countries in the continent.

The authors adopt a case study approach on four different kinds of countries, namely oil-rich economy, green bond innovator, renewable energy user and carbon vulnerability.

The authors found that Africa's green bond is still at the early stages. However, countries are using innovative ways that are adaptable to their current economic conditions and investment attractiveness in issuing green bonds. While some countries focus on central and local government bonds, others use corporate bonds, few combine government and corporate green bonds. Interestingly, the first green bond globally certified by the Climate Bonds Standard was issued by an Africa country in Africa. In some selected countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco, Namibia and Kenya, green bond markets have seen massive growth and have contributed to numerous infrastructural energy efficiency projects. To expand this market further in these countries, the authors recommend fostering a public–private partnership backed by policies and political will.

This study provides an original contribution to the green bond and its likelihood of driving energy efficiency in a continent that has attracted little to no attention in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between insurance penetration and economic growth in eight selected African countries.

The auto-regressive distributed lags bounds approach to cointegration is employed on annual time-series data from 1990 to 2010 to test the causal relationship between insurance and economic growth in Algeria, Gabon, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. The ratio of life and non-life insurance premiums to gross domestic product are employed as proxies for insurance market development.

The results of the bound test shows a long-run relationship between insurance market activities and economic growth for Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. Causality analysis within the vector error correction model indicates a uni-directional causality from insurance market development to economic growth except for Morocco where there is evidence of a bi-directional causality. Causality within the vector autoregressive framework also provides evidence of a uni-directional causality for Algeria and Madagascar to support the “supply-leading” hypothesis while mixed causality was found for Gabon.

This findings provides policy direction for governments and regulatory authorities for developing insurance market in the sample countries.

This is the first study to examine the finance-growth relationship from the perspective of insurance markets in a cross-section of African countries.

The study aims to examine the importance of access to finance in firm innovation by using firm-level data from the World Bank enterprise survey (WBES) on selected African countries.

This study utilises firm-level data from the WBES database and computes aggregate innovation index by using multiple correspondent analysis. The authors then apply instrumental variable models (to control for possible endogeneity between innovation and finance) to assess the link between finance and innovation.

The research finds that finance in the form of overdraft overwhelmingly drives innovation in all selected countries – Cameroon, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. Trade credit enhances innovation among firms in Nigeria, South Africa and Cameroon, while asset finance drives innovation amongst firms in Cameroon, Nigeria and South Africa.

Policy incentives such as tax breaks could be put in place for financial intermediaries that have shown proof of extending loans to financially constraint firms to enable them to innovate. Furthermore, different financial institutions such as microfinance institutions can be supported to increase credit to enterprises. Partnerships with organisations willing to fund firms and support start-ups should be encouraged. One of such support mechanisms could be specialised schemes such as a credit guarantee scheme to encourage and secure lending to enterprises to promote innovation.

This paper provides empirical insights into how finance enhances innovation in African enterprises. It also shows how different finance structures (overdraft, asset finance and trade credit) affect firm innovation in different African countries.

The study measures the total systemic risks and connectedness across commodities, stocks, exchange rates and bond markets in Africa during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The study uses the Diebold-Yilmaz spillover and connectedness measures in a generalized VAR framework. The author calculates the net transmitters or receivers of shocks between two assets and visualizes their strength using a network analysis tool.

The study found low systemic risks across all assets and countries. However, we found higher systemic risks in the forex market than in the stock and bond markets, and in South Africa than in other countries. The dynamic analysis found time-varying connectedness return shocks, which increased during the peak periods of the first and second waves of the pandemic. We found both gold and oil as net receivers of shocks. Overall, over half of all assets were net receivers, and others were net transmitters of return shocks. The network connectedness plot shows high net pairwise connectedness from Morocco to South Africa stock market.

The study has implications for policymakers to develop the capacities of local investors and markets to limit portfolio outflows during a crisis.

Previous studies have analyzed spillovers across asset classes in a single country or a single asset across countries. This paper contributes to the literature on network connectedness across assets and countries.