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This study investigates the dynamic relationship between trade openness, external debt, and economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the period from 1990 to 2023. The research examines how trade openness and external debt impact regional economic performance by employing Panel Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) techniques utilizing the pool mean group and mean group estimator's approach. The analysis reveals that while trade openness does not stimulate economic growth, external debt similarly has significant challenges, often hindering long-term development prospects within Sub-Saharan African countries. The findings underscore the importance of managing debt sustainably and aligning trade policies with growth-enhancing strategies. Additionally, human capital and institutional quality are essential endogenous growth factors that significantly influence economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study recommends that while trade openness alone may not directly drive economic growth, its benefits can be amplified by complementary strategies such as investing in human capital, technological adoption, and industrial policy. The study concludes with policy recommendations to enhance economic resilience and foster sustainable growth, such as attracting foreign direct investment, combined with infrastructure development and sound fiscal management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactions between monetary and macroprudential policy are crucial in safeguarding price and financial stability. This study investigates the macroeconomic and financial impacts of monetary and macroprudential policy interactions in South Africa, a leading African economy in developing macroprudential frameworks. The existing literature largely focuses on the effectiveness of these policies independently, leaving a gap in understanding how their interaction affects their overall efficacy. Employing a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model and utilizing data from 1980 to 2023, this study uniquely incorporates the financial cycle to represent financial developments. The results reveal significant effects of both policies on key variables such as output, the financial cycle, and the price level. Specifically, policy contractions reduce output and the financial cycle but increase the price level, illustrating the 'price puzzle'. This study further identifies an endogenous response between the two policies: monetary policy reacts by rising to reduce price levels following a macroprudential shock, while macroprudential policy rises to stimulate financial activity after a monetary shock. These findings underscore the importance of using both policies in conjunction but in opposite directions to balance their effects and achieve price and financial stability. This study suggests that an optimal combination of monetary and macroprudential policies is critical for maintaining macroeconomic equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies often conclude that in SADC would be disastrous and not optimal for all member countries. This is because of the observed low, and even negative correlation amongst member countries. However, Frankel and Rose (1998) demonstrate that the degree of synchronisation is not irrevocably fixed and is endogenous to other factors. Hence, this study is set out to investigate factors influencing business cycle synchronisation in the SADC region. More precisely, we use a generalised method of moments (GMM) to investigate the influence of trade integration, financial integration, fiscal policy convergence, monetary policy similarity and oil prices (a proxy for global common shocks) on the degree of business cycle synchronisation. To conduct our analysis, we data covering the period of 1980-2014, we use bilateral data due to unavailability of regional aggragates. We find trade, fiscal policy convergence and monetary policy similarity to have a sanguine impact on the degree of synchronisation. Moreover, owing to their procyclical behavior, financial flows lead to diverging business cycles. In addition, we find oil prices to exert a negative impact on business cycle comovement in the SADC region. Our results have far-reaching policy implications for the proposed SADC monetary union- by stimulating trade, ensuring coherence in macroeconomic policies SADC could move closer to becoming an optimal currency area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]