Supporting Africa’s Post-Crisis Growth: The Role of Macroeconomic Policies

Zuzana Brixiová Schwidrowski and Leonce Ndikumana

Working Papers from Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Abstract: The authors discuss macroeconomic policies that would help African countries, especially the low-income countries, reach strong, sustained and shared growth in the post-crisis world. They review, with a special focus on LICs, macroeconomic policies in Africa prior to the crisis. The working paper then discusses factors behind ‘the Africa surprise’ that is the continent’s overall good performance during the crisis and relatively fast recovery. It underscores that in the aftermath of the crisis, the emphasis of the macroeconomic policy needs to shift from the objective of very low inflation that predominated prior to the crisis towards growth. Fiscal policy is key in this regard, through public outlays on infrastructure anchored in the medium term expenditure frameworks that would also have a counter-cyclical role. Where conditions allow, frontier market LICs may want to consider adopting flexible inflation targeting frameworks that would provide sufficient room for expansion of credit to the private sector.

Keywords: macroeconomic policies; growth; capital flows; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E5 F43 O11 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://per.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers ... rs_251-300/WP254.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to per.umass.edu:443 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Working Paper: SUPPORTING AFRICA’S POST-CRISIS GROWTH: THE ROLE OF MACROECONOMIC POLICIES (2011)
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:uma:periwp:wp254

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Judy Fogg ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).