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Publications (17)
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– The case of Ghana
One essential condition of economic progress in any society is an ample supply of savings, which depends on the growth of real capital.Economists agree that higher investment rates will lead to higher growth. Thus, domestic savings is considered an important determinant of growth in developing...
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– Unity in diversity
This paper examines the national savings behaviour in the process of economic growth through a comparative analysis of countries in developing Asia from a historical perspective. Developing Asia provides an ideal laboratory for the study with considerable differences in the savings behaviour among...
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– Empirical evidence
This paper examines trends and determinants of gross domestic savings in Tanzania using data for the period 1990–2020. The autoregressive distributed lag approach is employed to empirically analyse the short-run and long-run relationships. There has been a fairly stable increase in the domestic...
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– Do sovereign wealth funds serve development?
Do sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) contribute to Africa’s development? This paper assesses the objectives of SWFs (fiscal stabilization, productive investment, intergenerational saving) and discusses alternatives. We argue that fiscal stabilization funds are often necessary, but entail considerable...
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The savings–growth nexus is widely acknowledged, both in policy and in the literature. But Kenya’s numerous policy initiatives to encourage savings mobilization are yet to yield the expected outcomes. This paper identifies the key drivers of domestic saving in Kenya, exploiting fintech as an...
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Capital markets facilitate capital growth by mobilizing savings and converting them into investments, and they are therefore a stimulant of economic growth. There is evidence that countries with high savings rates tend to grow faster. Although most sub-Saharan Africa countries recognize the...
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This paper traces the development of fintech in sub-Saharan Africa, its evolution over time, and the unfolding benefits attained at each stage of its adoption and market evolution. From the onset, fintechs have revolutionized retail electronic payment systems—a revolution that has evolved into a...
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The population structure the world over is going through a demographic shift, and the elderly proportion is projected to increase with population growth. This change is a matter of concern for sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, where the majority of the people are young and the rates of both...
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This paper employs data from 103 developing countries between 1981 and 2012 to examine the determinants of private savings in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with a focus on the effect of financial liberalization on private savings. It also analyses why the savings rate for SSA countries is lower than for...
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– Disentangling the roles of trend and cycle
Resource mobilization continues to be an important policy challenge for developing economies, raising questions as to what determines differences in saving behaviour across countries. Using a panel of 47 economies with at least 40 years of continuous time series data, we causally identify, using a...
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Social scientists are increasingly engaging in experimental research projects of importance for public policy in developing areas. While this research holds the possibility of producing major social benefits, it may also involve manipulating populations, often without consent, sometimes with...
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– Definitions and Diagrams
The fundamental problem of external validity is not to generalize from one experiment, so much as to experimentally test generalizable theories. That is, theories that explain the systematic variation of causal effects across contexts. Here we show how the graphical language of causal diagrams can...
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In recent years, randomized controlled trials have become increasingly popular in the social sciences. In development economics in particular, their use has attracted considerable debate in relation to the identification of ‘what works’ in development policy. This paper focuses on a core topic in...
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– Opportunities and Challenges
‘Ancillary experiments’ are a new technique whereby researchers use a completed experiment conducted by others to recover causal estimates of a randomized intervention on new outcomes. The method requires pairing new outcome data with randomized treatments the researchers themselves did not oversee...
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– Towards Experiments?
In examining the study of government performance, this paper asks whether field experiments can improve the explanatory precision of results generated by public opinion surveys. Survey research on basic health and education services sub-Saharan Africa shows that the perceived ‘user friendliness’ (or...
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– Experimental and Non-Experimental Methods in Development Economics
This paper provides a survey of six widely used non-experimental methods for estimating the impact of programmes in the context of developing economies (instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, direct matching, propensity score matching, linear regression and non-parametric methods, and...
Displaying 16 of 17 results