 Investment Climate of Financial Services in Africa(Country Attractiveness Indices)Satinder Bhatia ()
No 1529, Working Papers from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Abstract: The African continent today stands at a threshold of opportunities. The continent is heterogeneous in its cultural, economic and geographical aspects in so far as the domain contains more than 50 countries and different economic and regional blocs. Trivial to say that the diversity embodied in geographical, economic and cultural aspects extends to the financial front as well. Understanding this diversity is important and here the attempt is to build on the same. This goes along with the fact that in this contemporary era, a sound financial system lies at the heart of a well-functioning economy. Financial services like credit, savings, banking, insurance, payment etc. are closely tied with all sectors of the economy; hence, governments strive to close the gap between the financial needs of entities and access of services available to them.This paper is an attempt to study the investment climate of financial services in the African continent by first studying the domestic state of affairs in the sector and then the macro governance indicators pointing out towards the amenability of the domestic environment to foreign investment. The paper begins with an overview of the current state of financial system in Africa through the study of several indicators like per capita GDP, ratio of liquid liabilities to GDP, log of liquid liabilities etc. After this broad overview of Africa’s performance in the financial sector, the paper looks at financial conditions in each region of Africa viz. East Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa, North Africa and Central Africa in greater detail. The analysis is carried out using calculation of various indices that unveil a country’s performance compared to its respective region as well as compared to the whole of Africa. The entire exercise is, thereby, an attempt to understand how a country is doing absolutely and relatively to its region and its continent in terms of domestic and foreign investment opportunities. Keywords: investment climate; financial services; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ift:wpaper:1529 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Contact information at EDIRC. |
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