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Public debt in sub-Saharan African countries: determinants and economic effects
Get PDFOne of the key macroeconomic policy issues that emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis is the persistent increase in public deficits and debt across the globe. Among researchers and policy makers, this has been the subject of an intense and ongoing debate that mainly seeks to address two issues, namely, the determinants of the growing debt and the economic effects thereof. While most of the debate centres on the advanced and emerging market economies, only a limited number of studies have looked at the case of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries. This is despite the fact that many countries in the sub-region have been through debt crises in previous decades and are currently facing the imminence of another crisis. This thesis extends the public debt literature by examining the drivers and growth effects of public debt with a focus on SSA countries. The aim is to carry out a more comprehensive analysis of public debt that accounts for the nuances of the sub-region. The thesis is composed of three distinct but interrelated studies. The first study examines the drivers of public debt while the second study focuses on the growth effects of debt. Both studies employ panel econometric techniques using data for SSA countries. The third study is motivated by recent empirical evidence which shows that the drivers and growth effects of public debt do vary substantially across countries due to unique country-specific factors which may not be accounted for in a panel data framework. The study therefore aims to compare country-specific evidence with the evidence obtained from the studies that employ panel data on SSA countries. It focuses on the country case of Nigeria and examines both the determinants and growth effects of public debt. The focus on Nigeria is important due to its position as SSA's most populous and largest economy. Moreover, the country's public debt history is similar to that of most SSA countries. Hence, this study is likely to provide results comparable to studies that utilize panel data for SSA countries. The first study on the determinants of public debt in SSA contributes to the existing literature in two important ways. First, whereas much of the recent discussions around the topic employ descriptive methods, this study employs formal econometric methods namely, the pooled OLS, fixed effects, and the GMM-type methods of Arellano-Bond and Arellano-Bover/BlundellBond. While the fixed effects method helps to deal with unobserved country and time-specific fixed effects, the GMM methods go beyond to account for both the dynamic panel bias and the potential endogeneity in the debt-growth relationship. Overall, the aim of employing a variety of panel estimation techniques is to ensure robustness and facilitate the comparison of the results. Second and more important, instead of focusing only on the macroeconomic factors as previous studies have done, this study also accounts for the influence of armed conflict, governance quality, and regime-type, which are uniquely important to SSA countries. Empirical analyses are aided by data on 40 SSA countries spanning 1996-2017. The findings confirm the role of economic, socio-political and institutional variables in explaining the growth of public debt in SSA. Specifically, the study provides compelling evidence supporting the debt-reducing roles of economic growth and governance quality, and the debt-inducing role of conflict. Regarding the policy relevance of these findings, we note that there have been some uncertainties around the growth prospects of SSA countries in recent years. Additionally, the incidence of violent conflict has recently increased (Barrett, 2018), coupled with the low quality of governance and institutions prevalent in many SSA countries. The findings therefore, have relevant policy implications that can contribute to the efforts towards debt sustainability in SSA countries. The second study examines the growth effects of public debt in SSA using an augmented growth model that includes public debt and its squared term to account for the possible presence of a nonlinear effect. Most studies on the effects of debt on growth, particularly following the global financial crisis, have focused mainly on the advanced and emerging countries. Also, most previous studies have assumed that the debt-growth nexus is homogeneous across groups, and that countries are cross-section dependent. This study addresses these issues while focusing on SSA countries. The focus on SSA provides the opportunity to account for the factors that are unique to the sub-region, namely, the quality of institutions and policies, conflict, and adverse terms of trade shocks. The study employs the fixed effects and system GMM methods under the assumption of homogeneity, and the mean group estimators when assuming that the debt-growth nexus is heterogeneous across countries. It employs a dataset comprising 24 SSA countries spanning 1980-2015. This time period is determined by the data on government gross debt to SSA countries in the Historical Public Debt Database as compiled by Abbas et al. (2011). Mainly, the results strongly affirm the non-linear relationship between public debt and growth, and show that the Debt Laffer curve applies to SSA countries. Furthermore, the results confirm the generally low debt-carrying capacity of SSA countries. A key policy implication of the study is the need for SSA countries to acknowledge their limited capacity to sustain large amounts of debt. Additionally, a comparative analysis of short-term and long-term debt highlights the importance of having a balanced debt structure to aid the management of public debt. The third study examines the determinants of public debt and its non-linear effects on economic growth in Nigeria. It contributes to the existing literature in three distinct ways. First, in addition to the macroeconomic factors underlying the evolution of public debt in Nigeria, the study accounts for the influence of socio-political factors, including armed conflict and governance quality. To the best of the researcher's knowledge, this would be the first study to take this approach to the debate in the literature focusing on Nigeria. Second, whereas previous studies on Nigeria have mainly employed the external debt component, this study employs the total public debt, as well as the individual components, internal and external debt, for a more comprehensive analysis of Nigeria's public debt. Third, it focuses on the non-linear aspect of the debt-growth nexus which has also been largely ignored in the literature on Nigeria. The study relies on annual time series data sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria and World Development Indicators spanning 1970-2017. Empirical analyses are carried out using the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration. The analyses of the determinants of public debt produced results largely in line with those obtained from the study on SSA countries. Economic variables tend to have a strong influence across the regressions. In particular, government's fiscal position, oil price, the real interest rate, and the real exchange rate, are consistently significant across the regressions. Although armed conflict is significant in the external debt model, it turns out that socio-political variables do not play a significant role in the model for Nigeria. Turning to the question of the debt-growth nexus, this study presents compelling evidence of a nonlinear relationship between public debt and growth for the case of Nigeria, similar to the evidence obtained from the panel of SSA countries. There is, albeit, a difference in the nature of the nonlinear relationship. Whereas the panel study presents several threshold estimates that do not reflect the debt-carrying capacity of SSA countries, this study presents a threshold estimate of 56% for total public debt, which does not differ much from the IMF's sustainable threshold of 45% for Nigeria and other lower-middle income countries. Based on these findings, it is important for the government to exercise restraint on spending by ensuring that deficits are created mainly for profitable investments that can yield future streams of income
Determinants of fiscal effort in sub-Saharan African countries: Does conflict matter?
Get PDFThis study investigates the determinants of fiscal effort in sub-Saharan African (SSA) within the framework of fiscal reaction functions. Whereas previous studies focusing on SSA have mainly considered the economic non-debt determinants this study accounts for the role of conflict given its persistence in many SSA countries. It employs a variety of panel econometric methods that are applicable in tackling the problem of endogeneity. Specifically the study employs the instrumental variables fixed effects, the two-step generalised method of moments (GMM) and the traditional two-stage least squares techniques. Mainly the evidence shows that although SSA governments have made fiscal adjustments in response to the escalating levels of debt, conflict impacts negatively on this response in SSA. Furthermore, the results affirm the presence of fiscal fatigue in SSA’s fiscal reaction function. Recommendations based on these findings are discussed
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Informal economies and energy efficiency: Empirical evidence from African countries
No full textPervasive informal economies can significantly hinder efforts to improve energy efficiency. This study investigates the complex relationship between informality and energy efficiency in African countries, focusing on linear, nonlinear, and asymmetric effects. The research aims to clarify how varying levels of informality affect energy efficiency and the intervening roles of foreign direct investment (FDI) and institutional quality. Employing a panel dataset of 46 African countries from 1990 to 2017, the study utilizes Stochastic Frontier Analysis to derive energy efficiency scores. It applies panel autoregressive distributed lag and the dynamic panel threshold models to assess the effects of informality. Findings from the linear model reveal that informality may have some initial beneficial effects on energy efficiency. Further evidence of nonlinearity is strongly supported, showing that informality may improve energy efficiency only up to a threshold of between 41 and 42 % of GDP, beyond which it becomes detrimental to its performance. Similarly, compelling evidence of asymmetric effects is reported: positive and negative shocks have increasing and decreasing effects on energy efficiency, respectively. Additional evidence indicates that FDI lowers energy efficiency, whereas governance quality is associated with improved energy efficiency. Lastly, FDI mitigates the negative effect of informality in line with the halo effect. These results reflect the heterogeneous effects of informality that have been reported by prior studies. Policy recommendations based on these findings are discussed
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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