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This paper uses two nationally representative datasets collected in 1992 and 2003 in Gambia to analyse small, non-farm enterprises. The results reveal evidence of significant credit constraint among these non-farm enterprises. Specifically, household wealth is a significant determinant not only of entry into the enterprise sector but also determines investment levels conditional upon entry. Furthermore, the marginal returns to investments in enterprises are very high and significantly exceed the prevailing lending rates of banks in the country. Besides being credit constrained, these enterprises are also affected by farm-related variables. Agricultural risk adversely affects enterprise investment. This latter result underscores the importance of livelihood diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the weak form of market efficiency of five major stock markets; four African equity markets and one developed market. The weekly market index returns of the EGX 30, NSE 20, NSE All Share Index, FTSE-JSE All Share Index and the S&P 500 Index were analysed for the period 1998-2008. To determine if the stylized fact of stock returns in African markets violate the random walk hypothesis, numerous econometric and statistical techniques are employed. These methods include the autocorrelation test, the unit test, linear and non-linear models. The results indicate that the African markets do not behave in a manner consistent with the weak form of market efficiency. These results provide a contrast between the emerging African markets and the developed markets. It suggests that African emerging markets have higher average returns and volatility than developed markets. We argue that if the market could be made less volatile, it has the potential to attract more investment because of its attractive returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the trend, constraints, promotion, and prospects of investment – domestic investment, foreign direct investment, and private portfolio investment – in Africa. After identifying the importance of investment in Africa's economic development, it was shown that all forms of investment are low in Africa and hence inadequate for the attainment of the MDGs and poverty reduction in the continent. The constraining factors include: low resources mobilization; high degree of uncertainty; poor governance, corruption, and low human capital development; unfavorable regulatory environment and poor infrastructure, small individual country sizes; high dependence on primary commodities exports and increased competition; poor image abroad; shortage of foreign exchange and the burden of huge domestic and external debt; and undeveloped capital markets, their high volatility, and home bias by foreign investors. The paper recommends that successful promotion of both domestic, foreign direct and portfolio investment in Africa will require actions and measures at the national, regional, and international levels. It concludes that the prospects are bright. New and attractive investment opportunities are emerging in infrastructure, particularly as most African countries now encourage public/private partnerships for investments in this sector. In addition to privatization, renewed interest within Africa in undertaking regionally based projects and joint exploitation of natural resources is creating other investment opportunities. Apart from the fact that investment in Africa yields the highest returns, investment risk in the continent is declining. In addition, much progress has been made in recent years to improve the investment climate in Africa. All this is of course is not to deny that obstacles do remain hence economic reforms to enhance domestic investment would need to be complemented by measures to attract increased foreign capital. Critical in such endeavors must be efforts to improve governance in some countries as well as to eliminate socio-political violence in others and development of domestic capital markets, while government institutions must be modernized and upgraded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a framework for making decisions on what type of infrastructure to build and where to build. The basic intuition is that by deriving the marginal physical products of installed infrastructure, we can prioritize infrastructure investment of the same type between regions, and of different types within a region. The methodology is to estimate a panel of regional production functions that allows the intercepts to capture individual differences ('the fixed effects') but uses interactive dummies to capture the effect of individual differences on marginal productivity. This framework could be a useful tool for the management of public capital in an economy subject to fiscal federalism, particularly where the interaction of interest-group struggle and the politics of center-state grants may involve difficult trade-offs. Ce document établit un cadre de prise de décision concernant le type d'infrastructures à construire et l'endroit où les construire. L'idée de base est qu'en déterminant le produit matériel marginal des infrastructures installées, nous pouvons classer par ordre de priorités l'investissement dans les infrastructures de même type entre régions et de types différents au sein d'une région. La méthode consiste à définir un panel de fonctions de production régionale dont les coordonnées permettent de saisir les différences individuelles ("les effets fixes"), mais qui recourt à des variables muettes pour obtenir l'effet des différences individuelles sur la productivité marginale. Ce cadre pourrait se révéler utile pour la gestion des investissements publics dans une économie sujette au fédéralisme fiscal, en particulier lorsque l'interaction entre les revendications de groupes d'intérêts et la politique de subvention du gouvernement cent [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]