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This study investigates the effect of government domestic payment arrears on private investment. The authors argue that an increase in government domestic arrears can reduce private sector investment owing to the competition for credit.

The prediction is empirically tested using data for 33 Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries for the period 2007–2018 using a panel general methods of moment estimation technique. This is also complemented with impulse responses derived from the standard vector autoregressive model.

The results show that an increase in government domestic arrears adversely affects private investment in SSA and most subregional communities within SSA. It also revealed that private investment negatively responds to shocks in government domestic arrears.

This is the first study that attempts to investigate the effect of government domestic borrowing arrears on private investment. It seeks to serve as a guide to governments in their domestic borrowing decisions to ensure timely servicing.

As an effort to support the quest for a stable financial sector, this study aims to determine the factors that contribute to the financial stability gap in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The estimation techniques used include the fixed and random effect, system general methods of moments and dominance analysis. The data used is annual data for 33 SSA countries, covering the period 2007 to 2018.

Key findings from the analyses indicate that nonperforming loans increase gaps in financial stability while regulatory quality, control of corruption, political stability and appreciation of the local currency reduce the financial stability gap in SSA.

The absence of a specific metric for measuring the financial stability gap appears to be the limitation of this study. Its existence could improve the discussion and also make replicability easier. However, this study relies on a measure introduced by Kulu et al. (2022b), which is also acceptable and quite popular in the literature.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first in the finance literature to estimate the determinants of the financial stability gap in SSA.

The importance of the security-political strategies of Africa's subregional organisations was accentuated in 2002 with the launching of the African Union's Common African Defence and Security Policy (CADSP), which will include, among other things, the establishment of a Continental Early Warning System and an African Standby Force. From that point on, subregional organisations were to be the building blocks of an all-African approach to security politics. The strategies of these organisations range from the top-down approach of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to the bottom-up approach of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). Taking into account the particular characteristics of Africa's regional conflicts, this article examines the relevance for the CADSP of the approaches to conflict prevention and resolution of the latter two organisations. It analyses, first, the challenges facing the African Standby Force through an examination of ECOWAS's security-political strategy, and, second, the challenges facing the Continental Early Warning System through a look at IGAD's strategies. It suggests that two main issues are of critical relevance for the success of the CADSP. First is the lack of compatibility between the all-African strategy and the strategies of the various subregional organisations. Second is the lack of compatibility between formal processes of integration and trans-state regionalism within the continent. Although formal processes of integration are important, informal processes often play a much stronger role, undermining much of the progress made by the formal processes.

Informed by the literature on regional security and fragile states, ‘new regionalisms’, and natural resources and violent conflict, this essay investigates the challenges of state-building in West Africa. These range from the influence of diasporas and subregional strongmen to flows of small arms and light weapons (SALWs) and lootable natural resources. The analytical framework that links patron–client networks and lootable natural resources is applied to the cases of Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire. In recent years, strategies by African leaders to co-opt subregional strongmen as part of patronage networks have failed. The essay finds that an ossified state presence and the erosion of a leader's influence enables subregional strongmen to gain control over valuable natural resources, such as diamonds. The essay then assesses the impact of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) on state-building, concluding that although international regimes like the KPCS can increase state capacity and thereby counter the deleterious effects of state failure, they are not sufficient state-building tools. Hence, the KPCS must be supplemented through a combination of more explicit state-building initiatives under the auspices of bilateral government donors, aid agencies, diasporas and transnational and local NGOs.

This paper investigates the use of Twitter for studying the social representations of different regions across the world towards new food trends.

A density-based clustering algorithm was applied to 7,014 tweets to identify regions of consumers sharing content about food trends. The attitude of their social representations was addressed with the sentiment analysis, and grid maps were used to explore subregional differences.

Twitter users have a weak, positive attitude towards food trends, and significant differences were found across regions identified, which suggests that factors at the regional level such as cultural context determine users' attitude towards food innovations. The subregional analysis showed differences at the local level, which reinforces the evidence that context matters in consumers' attitude expressed in social media.

The social media content is sensitive to spatio-temporal events. Therefore, research should take into account content, location and contextual information to understand consumers' perceptions. The methodology proposed here serves to identify consumers' regions and to characterize their attitude towards specific topics. It considers not only administrative but also cognitive boundaries in order to analyse subsequent contextual influences on consumers' social representations.

The approach presented allows marketers to identify regions of interest and localize consumers' attitudes towards their products using social media data, providing real-time information to contrast with their strategies in different areas and adapt them to consumers' feelings.

This study presents a research methodology to analyse food consumers' understanding and perceptions using not only content but also geographical information of social media data, which provides a means to extract more information than the content analysis applied in the literature.

Surging global natural disasters provide incentive for risk-reducing policies and strategies. In this light, the African Union (AU) engaged a multi-stakeholder policy formulation process between 2002 and 2006, to develop a continent-wide disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategy. Drawing from secondary data, this chapter assesses the process and applies qualitative analysis instruments to critically assess the AU’s disaster policy. Linkages to the 2005 international Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) are also highlighted. The analysis reveals that Africa’s policy formulation process was belated for over a decade, with respect to international expectations. The formulation process was however largely African owned and led, culminating in a strategy document that reflected African contextual reality at the time, and aligned well with HFA fundamental goals. The applied multi-stakeholder approach enhanced a spirit of participation across levels and was central to the largely successful policy formulation process. However, targeted policy outcomes were not explicit, and poorly formulated indicators marred short- and long-term policy evaluation. Based on these results, we conclude that the African-wide DRR policy formulation processes were belated but participatory, systematic and very successful. Belated policy formulation reflects an initial inertia on the African continent, justified by past negative policy experiences and the desire to succeed. A replication of this policy formulation approach in Africa is recommended, albeit exercising more caution on policy timing, the elaboration of better monitoring and evaluation instruments and criteria. Participation should further embrace modern, risk-free (anti-COVID-19-friendly) information and communication technologies.

South‐South trade is the fastest growing segment of world trade in the last two decades. This paper aims at demonstrating that it is a unique opportunity and a sound development tool for developing countries.

The paper describes the statistical and empirical evidence from a macroeconomic and microeconomic viewpoint, and discusses the policy options developing country governments face to promote South‐South trade and investment.

Not all regions, countries, products and services fare equally in the current state of play. That South‐South trade expands at a much faster pace than other trade, although it is subject to higher barriers and higher distance‐related costs, suggests that addressing trade facilitation issues is of the essence for future progress, including major investments in trade‐related infrastructure, like the modernization of air and water ports, roads, transport and customs services.

South‐South trade expansion is a market‐driven development – mostly resulting from the widespread operation of international supply chains of the South – that may be enhanced by government intervention but seldom spearheaded by it in the long run.

The “natural” next questions are whether South‐South trade can be an alternative to North‐South trade, whether the learning process for international trading is enhanced or retarded by it, and whether the proliferation of PTAs is strangulating progress in rules‐based multilateralism, the first‐best choice according to mainstream economic theory. Even more important in development terms is whether South‐South trade can help bring developing countries, small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and the poor into the export process or, rather, it is a distraction from the real targets. This paper suggests there are robust answers to these queries already.

This paper aims to explore how sub-national or regional cultural differences influence backers’ willingness to crowdfund projects. The paper also explores how migrant transnationalism influences the impact of backer’s sub-national culture and crowdfunding relationships.

This paper is based on the experimental design technique using analysis of covariance methods. The authors tested the study hypotheses on a sample of 790 respondents.

The study results suggest that individuals differ in their intent to crowdfund product campaigns depending on value congruence between their cultural values derived from the region to which they belong and the nature of the product category, such as environmentally friendly or happiness-enhancing products.

This paper explores the role of regional cultural differences in determining the intention to crowdfund different campaigns based on the nature of the product. Value congruence, as driven by regional cultural differences with crowdfunding campaigns, has not been explored before.

This chapter discusses the relationship between the amount of social capital resources and the local response to floods. It contains selected results of a large study on social attitudes towards natural hazards (floods, storm, and landslides) conducted in Southern Poland. The results focus on the actions taken by the inhabitants of six communities of different sizes threatened by floods. Both individual and collective mitigation behaviors are analyzed. Demographic and social characteristics are used to explain differences in local preparedness. Communities were chosen to represent three historical regions with different levels of bonding and bridging social capital. The results indicate the importance of strong ties (bonding social capital) in local flood preparedness and participatory risk management. Weak ties (bridging social capital) seem to be less useful, although their strengthening is necessary in areas with high migratory flows. We conclude that local risk assessment calls for better knowledge and understanding of local network capacities and their possible use in local flood risk governance strategies.