scholarly journals Does Financial Liberalisation Improve Access to Investment Finance in Developing Countries?

Author(s):  
Conor M. O’Toole

AbstractThis paper considers the effect of financial liberalisation on access to investment finance using firm level data covering 48 developing and transition countries. An index is presented which measures financial market liberalisation along the following policy dimensions: directed lending, credit controls and reserve requirements, state control of banking, openness of international financial flows, banking market entry, prudential regulation and supervision and securities market development. Categorising firms as financially constrained across four measures, the results indicate that financial liberalisation is robustly associated with a reduction in the probability of being credit constrained, with the effect strongest for young, domestic private small and medium sized enterprises. For Sub-Saharan Africa, the results indicate that financial liberalisation actually increases financing constraints for firms. This may help explain the stylised fact that despite a commitment to financial reform, the predicted growth benefits have not been realised in this region.

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 1287-1317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sotiris Blanas ◽  
Adnan Seric ◽  
Christian Viegelahn

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-370
Author(s):  
Habtamu Tesfaye Edjigu ◽  
Nicholas Sim

Abstract Firms in the SSAs (sub-Saharan African countries for short) face severe financial constraints. Because financial markets in the SSAs are underdeveloped, policymakers have sought after the establishment of foreign-owned firms in their countries to help, among others, alleviate the financial constraints faced by domestic firms. However, there is no empirical evidence that speaks to the association between foreign firm presence and domestic firms’ financial constraint. Using firm-level data spanning across 36 SSAs from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, we show that the increase in foreign firm presence can ease the financial constraints of domestic firms in the SSAs. One reason is that foreign-owned firms are not only less financially constrained, they are also less likely to apply for bank loans. Therefore, an increase in foreign firm presence may reduce the competition for loans and ease the financial constraints of domestic firms by improving their borrowing success.


AMBIO ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dilini Abeygunawardane ◽  
Angela Kronenburg García ◽  
Zhanli Sun ◽  
Daniel Müller ◽  
Almeida Sitoe ◽  
...  

AbstractActor-level data on large-scale commercial agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa are scarce. The peculiar choice of transnational investing in African land has, therefore, been subject to conjecture. Addressing this gap, we reconstructed the underlying logics of investment location choices in a Bayesian network, using firm- and actor-level interview and spatial data from 37 transnational agriculture and forestry investments across 121 sites in Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. We distinguish four investment locations across gradients of resource frontiers and agglomeration economies to derive the preferred locations of different investors with varied skillsets and market reach (i.e., track record). In contrast to newcomers, investors with extensive track records are more likely to expand the land use frontier, but they are also likely to survive the high transaction costs of the pre-commercial frontier. We highlight key comparative advantages of Southern and Eastern African frontiers and map the most probable categories of investment locations.


2013 ◽  
Vol 368 (1625) ◽  
pp. 20120405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas K. Rudel

For decades, the dynamics of tropical deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have defied easy explanation. The rates of deforestation have been lower than elsewhere in the tropics, and the driving forces evident in other places, government new land settlement schemes and industrialized agriculture, have largely been absent in SSA. The context and causes for African deforestation become clearer through an analysis of new, national-level data on forest cover change for SSA countries for the 2000–2005 period. The recent dynamic in SSA varies from dry to wet biomes. Deforestation occurred at faster rates in nations with predominantly dry forests. The wetter Congo basin countries had lower rates of deforestation, in part because tax receipts from oil and mineral industries in this region spurred rural to urban migration, declines in agriculture and increased imports of cereals from abroad. In this respect, the Congo basin countries may be experiencing an oil and mineral fuelled forest transition. Small farmers play a more important role in African deforestation than they do in southeast Asia and Latin America, in part because small-scale agriculture remains one of the few livelihoods open to rural peoples.


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