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In the name of development, governments in Africa are reformulating land policies to facilitate privatisation of customary land rights. The main rationale for this is to stimulate private investment through tradable land titles, which will enhance local economic activity and ultimately contribute to increased incomes and poverty alleviation. However, these land reform proposals have often produced unintended results leading to exclusion of the poor and servicing the interests of the elite. Zambia is not an exception in the land reform rhetoric. In 1995, the government enacted a pro-investment law to attract investment from abroad. Consequently, large tracts of customary land were converted to private tenure as increasing foreign investments were made in the country. One example of such investments is mining; for example, Lumwana and Kansanshi mines were opened up in Solwezi. These mines have attracted more people and fringe investments in search of economic opportunities. This has further led to increased pressure on land as more people and organisations seek to acquire customary land from chiefs and convert it to private leaseholds. This paper uses personal experience and research to present the achievements, potential and limitations of private investments in local communities and their economy. The paper argues that, despite the huge potential of private investment, attaining poverty alleviation through land reform strategies in Zambia still remains overshadowed by conflicting agendas, i.e. serving the interests of poor citizens versus pursuing the collective global market agenda in order to gain international recognition and acceptance. This is particularly crucial given that these agendas are often at odds with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's relationship with Africa has grown exponentially over the last decade with US$95 billion in bilateral trade in 2008 and US$5.4 billion of Chinese investment in Africa for the same year. The growth of Sino-African relations also has an impact on the role of traditional development partners in Africa in particular in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which has already led some traditional development partners to reduce their aid budgets and subsequently their Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows to Africa. The objective of this paper is to analyse different development cooperation modalities in Africa of traditional development partners and China. This requires identifying trends in aid, debt relief, general budget support, trade, preferential trade access, and investment flows of both traditional development partners and China. The paper advocates that complementarities can be built between these development modalities on a national, regional and global level. This would enhance development effectiveness, increase efficiency and create win-win situations which would be beneficial to African countries, China and traditional development partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature suggests that investment and economic growth respond very slowly to economic reform due to uncertainty about the permanence of reform. Despite clear theoretical underpinnings for the idea that policy reversal significantly impedes economic performance, there is limited empirical evidence on this topic. This paper derives empirical proxies for the probabilities of different types of policy reversal and investigates their impact on investment and growth in Sub-Saharan African countries. The results show that trade, fiscal, savings and financial policy reversals have been very damaging to investment and economic growth. The paper also finds that it is the prediction or expectation that reversal will occur that hurts performance. There is no evidence that exchange rate policy reversal has damaged performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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 presents empirical evidence on how telecommunications infrastructure is related to economic growth in a panel dataset covering 44 African countries for the period from 1990 to 2010. A dynamic panel data approach model is employed, which suggests that telecommunications contribute in a major way to the economic development of the continent, after controlling for a number of other factors. Furthermore, the findings also show that investment in telecommunications is subject to increasing returns, demonstrating that an increase in telecommunications investment produces further growth. Therefore, telecommunications investment and services should be encouraged in the region. [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 investigates the possible effects of the US reform of the international settlement rate system on telecommunications investment in Africa. We estimate a telecommunications investment equation using a panel data of 51 African countries during the 1991–2003 period and find that settlement payments have significantly positive effects on telecommunications investment in African countries. A 10 percent increase in settlement payment, on average, increases the telecommunications investment expenditure to GDP ratio by 3.4 percent over a three-year period. Using previously calculated revenue loss from the US reform, our estimates suggest that African countries stand to lose between 4.4 to 11 percentage points of their telecommunications investment in the medium run and with it, possible decreases in income growth rate. However, we argue that African countries can counter the effects of this revenue loss by increasing the efficiency of telecommunications investment through appropriate market restructuring, including the promotion of competition and privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Does regime type influence economic growth in Africa? This paper examines the relationship between political regimes and economic growth. More specifically, I investigate the economic performances of authoritarian and democratic systems in 44 African countries during the 1990s. Employing ordinary least squares (OLS) estimators and a cross-sectional research design and controlling for variables like economic development, domestic investment, economic openness, privatization, and education, I test the foregoing hypothesis. I find that the influence of regime type has some but not strong impact on African economic growth. One control variable that, for the most part, has a statistically significant influence on economic growth in Africa is domestic investment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]