Central Banking in Sub-Saharan Africa: Introduction and Overview

Olu Ajakaiye and Stephen O'Connell ()

Journal of African Economies, 2011, vol. 20, issue suppl_2, -ii15

Abstract: African central banks have covered an extraordinary distance since the early 1990s—closing the gap, in the process, between their own policy challenges and those of richer-country central banks. Some striking differences are nonetheless easily missed, amid the many parallels between central banking reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and those in the industrial and emerging-market economies. The abandonment of soft pegs in low-income SSA, for example, had less to do with capital mobility than with the failures of exchange control systems under pressure from fiscal imbalances and external shocks. Fiscal and quasi-fiscal demands, in turn, have almost certainly been more important than conventional stabilisation objectives as potential sources of inflation bias in SSA. Money-based disinflation programmes, to take a final example—often supported by tight fiscal rules under IMF conditionality—do not appear to have involved costly sacrifices of output, outside of South Africa. These observations, and more in the papers collected here, suggest that the distinctive structural and institutional features of low-income countries may have distinctive implications for the design and conduct of monetary policy. Collectively, the papers in this volume issue a compelling call for monetary policy research that focuses squarely on the economic environment of low-income Africa. Copyright 2011 , Oxford University Press.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejr004 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:20:y:2011:i:suppl_2:p:-ii15

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().