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This study examines the causal and dynamic link between financial inclusion and migrant remittances in sub-Saharan Africa.

The study employed a panel vector autoregressive (VAR) framework to examine the dynamic relationship between financial inclusion and migrant remittances in sub-Saharan Africa.

The findings indicate that there is a reverse causality between financial inclusion and migrant remittances in sub-Saharan Africa.

The practical implications of these findings are that central governments and economic policymakers in sub-Saharan African countries should formulate and implement policies aimed at fostering financial inclusion if they are to attract more migrant remittances to promote economic growth and financial sector development. This suggests that these two variables are complementary and not contradictory. The results also suggest that central banks and other financial institutions can leverage the positive effect of financial inclusion of financial sector development to enhance the development of the financial sector instead of pursuing financial sector development as a policy objective. This means policies aimed at promoting financial inclusion will not impede or sacrifice migrant remittances, economic growth and financial sector development.

This paper is the first to construct a financial inclusion index to examine the link between financial inclusion and migrant remittances from the sub-Saharan Africa perspective

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-10-2019-0612/

This study aims to investigate the belief that the innovative/skilled use of financing and dividend policy decision techniques depends on the firm’s host market classifications (frontier, emerging and developed markets).

Using survey studies with similar questions, the authors reviewed, tallied and compared firm characteristic subgroup mean values of 2.4 and above (≥ 60% usage rate) per technique per market classification for the financing decisions analysis. In the dividend policy analysis, the authors tabulated existing rank results per market classification.

Managers in Malaysia significantly issue stock based on whether the firm's recent profits have been sufficient to fund their activities; this technique is of low value to US and Ghanaian managers. Managers in Ghana significantly limit their debt so their customers/suppliers are not worried about the firm going out of business; this technique has low value for Malaysian and US managers. Managers in Malaysia significantly issue debt when it gives investors a better impression of their firm prospects than issuing stock; this technique is not valuable to Ghanaian and US managers. On dividends, Ghanaian and sanctioned Iranian managers significantly consider cash availability before a dividend decision; this has low value to emerging and developed market managers.

These findings suggest that managers must customise their sets of valuable financing and dividend techniques to reflect the business risks and hurdles per their firm’s host market classification – as markets may determine a technique’s usefulness. Also, the innovative/skilful use of financing and dividend techniques decreases as managers move from developed to frontier markets, possibly due to degrading market conditions.

A global comparative study of survey literature covering frontier, emerging and developed markets is rare in the literature.

This study seeks to examine the relationship between macroeconomic shock indicators, namely geopolitical risk (GPR), global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU) and financial stress (FS), and returns as well as volatilities on seven carefully selected stock markets in Africa. Specifically, the study intends to unravel the co-movement and interdependence between the respective macroeconomic shock indicators and each of the stock markets under consideration across time and frequency.

This study employed wavelet coherence approach to examine the strength and stability of the relationships across different time scales and frequency components, thereby providing valuable insights into specific periods and frequency ranges where the relationships are particularly pronounced.

The study found that GEPU, Financial Stress (FS) and GPR failed to induce significant influence on African stock market returns in the short term (0–4 months band), but tend to intensify in the long-term band (after 6th month). On the contrary, stock market volatilities exhibited strong coherence and interdependence with GEPU, FSI and GPR in the short-term band.

This study happens to be the first of its kind to comprehensively consider how the aforementioned macro-economic shock indicators impact stock markets returns and volatilities over time and frequency. Further, none of the earlier studies has attempted to examine the relationship between macro-economic shocks, stock returns and volatilities in different crisis periods. This study is the first of its kind in to employ data spanning from May 2007 to April 2023, thereby covering notable crisis periods such as global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic episodes.

This study seeks to: (1) examine the extent of interconnectedness prevailing between the cryptocurrency market, the stock market and the precious metals market. (2) Conduct thorough assessment of hedge and safe-haven qualities of broad range of precious metals and cryptocurrencies against returns on the African stock market.

This study applied two novel approaches that is Cross-quantilogram, an advanced statistical technique used to examine the relationship between quantiles of response variable and the quantiles of predictor variables, and TVP-VAR, a technique that captures the dynamic connectedness of variables under consideration.

It was found that the three markets are highly interconnected, particularly among assets under the respective financial markets. It was further revealed that the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) was the most resilient stock market, whereas Bitcoin, BNB, Silver (XAG) and Platinum (XPT) also exhibited notable resistance to shocks. Finally, the study found that cryptocurrencies and precious metals portrayed varying hedge and safe haven qualities under the various stock markets.

The high interdependency between the African stock market, cryptocurrencies and precious metals suggests that none of the markets is immune to shocks form the other market. The finding that cryptocurrencies and precious metals exhibit some degree of safe-haven and hedge potentials, albeit limited in certain stock markets, provides investors with alternative investment options during market downturns. Since most African stock markets, except the JSE, are net receivers of shocks, investors in these markets should exercise caution during periods of global financial uncertainty.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to explore the dynamic interconnectedness between seven carefully selected African stock markets, three distinct cryptocurrencies and four precious metals, while also assessing the hedge and safe-haven potential of the cryptocurrencies and precious metals against stock market returns. Additionally, the study stands out in recent literature by employing two novel approaches: the TVP-VAR model, which captures the dynamic connectedness among variables, and the Cross-Quantilogram, an advanced statistical method that analyzes the relationship between the quantiles of the response and predictor variables, all within a single study.

This study aimed to explore the effect of Financial Innovation (FI) on economic growth in Ghana, with a dataset spanning 1960–2019, adopting a broader conceptualization of FI as the ratio of broad money to narrow money.

The study employs a non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) time series econometric model to estimate data from the World Bank (1960–2019).

There is no evidence that FI significantly impacts economic growth. This could be due to the early and strict regulation of the financial technology (FIN-TECH) sector and the general inconclusiveness of the impact of financial development on economic growth.

Policymakers must empirically explore the impact of early and strict regulation on the transformational impact of FI.

The paper is among the first to apply a broader conceptualization of FI in estimating the impact of FI on economic growth.

This study investigated the interactive impact of global and domestic stock market variables on the depth of the financial system in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 1990 to 2018.

The study used the mean group and pooled mean group estimators for the dynamic heterogeneous panel.

The results provide strong statistical evidence that the depth of the financial system in SSA countries is influenced by a combination of local and international stock market indicators. While the local variables exert a positive influence, the global indicator tends to negatively affect the depth of the system, particularly the monetization ratio.

While the tendency of portfolio adjustments and reversal can be inferred, the study stresses the need for a more globalized approach to financial policy formulation and implementation even as the trend of global financializaton gets more robust and more profound.

This study is unique in that, unlike prior ones, it has extended the debate on the role of the stock market in financial deepening from a domestic to an international dimension. Financial policy making can be aided by the authors' findings through looking at the financial deepening-stock market linkage from both domestic and globalized perspectives.