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Banking in SSA has undergone very significant changes over the last two decades. Financial liberalization and related reforms, upgrades in institutional and more recently the expansion of cross-border banking activities and the rapid development of Pan-African banking groups are signaling greater financial integration and significant changes in the African banking and financial landscape. Nonetheless, excess liquidity in many countries reflects limited lending opportunities and, despite improvements, asset quality and provisioning remain comparatively low. Dollarization has also been a persistent characteristic in several natural resource-dependent economies. This paper discusses key stylized facts and trends of banking development in SSA, looking at a variety of dimensions such as size, depth, soundness, and efficiency. It also assess the rapid expansion of pan-African banking groups, which have overtaken the role of the European and U.S. banks that had traditionally dominated banking activities in SSA, creating significant cross-border networks and becoming the largest participants in new syndicates and large bilateral loans to finance infrastructure development.
FinTech is a major force shaping the structure of the financial industry in sub-Saharan Africa. New technologies are being developed and implemented in sub-Saharan Africa with the potential to change the competitive landscape in the financial industry. While it raises concerns on the emergence of vulnerabilities, FinTech challenges traditional structures and creates efficiency gains by opening up the financial services value chain. Today, FinTech is emerging as a technological enabler in the region, improving financial inclusion and serving as a catalyst for the emergence of innovations in other sectors, such as agriculture and infrastructure.
Using data collected from pan-African banks’ (PABs), balance sheets and other sources (Orbis, Fitch), this study identifies some key patterns of cross-border investment in bank subsidiaries by key banking groups in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and discusses some of the determinants of this investment. Using a gravity model relating the annual value of a banking group’s investment in the net equity of its subsidiaries to a set of explanatory variables, the analysis finds that cross-border banking is in part driven by a search for yield, diversification, and expansion for strategic reasons.
The Republic of Congo has seen dramatic improvement in its debt situation since 2010, following debt relief through the IMF and World Bank Heavily Indebted Poor Countries/Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative. Large oil revenues have allowed the country to boost spending and increase foreign exchange reserves. Yet poverty and inequality remain comparatively high. This paper examines Congo’s challenge to manage its natural resource revenue and attain sustained inclusive growth.
This paper presents an integrated framework for assessing systemic risk. The framework models banks’ capital asset ratios as a function of future losses and credit growth using a generalized method of moments to calibrate shocks to credit quality and credit growth. The analysis is complemented by a simple measure of systemic risk, which captures tail risk comovement among banks in the system. The main contribution of this paper is to advance a simple framework to integrate systemic risk scenarios that assess the impact of aggregate and idiosyncratic factors. The analysis is based on CreditRisk+, which uses analytical techniques—similar to those applied in the insurance industry - to estimate banks’ credit portfolio loss distributions, making no assumptions about the cause of default.
This Departmental Paper portrays a cross-country dimension of macroprudential policy implementation in Asia, advancing a comprehensive overview of institutional arrangements and instruments deployed by individual countries to address systemic risk, including risk concentration and interconnectedness. This book is the first comprehensive collection of papers assessing the existing institutional arrangements for macroprudential policies in Asia.
This paper explores the extent to which macroprudential tools can be used to manage banking sector risks in Mongolia, a commodity producing country exposed to both procyclical and cross-sectional financial sector risks. Loose fiscal policy, rising credit activity, and heightened risk appetite—attributable to the commodity boom—are fuelling price volatility in asset markets, posing significant risks to financial stability if left unchecked. Rising interconnectedness, potential increase in dollarization and concentrated exposures are compounding those risks. Macroprudential tools can complement fiscal and monetary policy adjustments to avoid the buildup of vulnerabilities in the banking sector.
Fragile states in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face challenges to respond to the effects of climate shocks and rising temperatures. Fragility is linked to structural weaknesses, government failure, and lack of institutional basic functions. Against this setup, climate change could add to risks. A panel fixed effects model (1980 to 2019) found that the effect of a 1◦C rise in temperature decreases income per capita growth in fragile states in SSA by 1.8 percentage points. Panel quantile regression models that account for unobserved individual heterogeneity and distributional heterogeneity, corroborate that the effects of higher temperature on income per capita growth are negative while the impact of income per capita growth on carbon emissions growth is heterogeneous, indicating that higher income per capita growth could help reduce carbon emissions growth for high-emitter countries. These findings tend to support the hypothesis behind the Environmental Kuznets Curve and the energy consumption growth literature, which postulates that as income increases, emissions increase pari passu until a threshold level of income where emissions start to decline.
Stress testing has become the risk management tool du jour in the wake of the global financial crisis. In countries where the information reported by financial institutions is considered to be of sufficiently good quality, and supervisory and regulatory standards are high, stress tests can be of significant value. In contrast, the proliferation of stress testing in underdeveloped financial systems with weak oversight regimes is fraught with uncertainties, as it is unclear what the results actually represent and how they could be usefully applied. In this paper, problems associated with stress tests using weak data are examined. We offer a potentially more useful alternative, the "breaking point" method, which also requires close coordination with on-site supervision and complemented by other supervisory tools and qualitative information. Excel spreadsheet templates of the stress tests presented in this paper are provided.
There is significant room to improve public investment efficiency in sub-Saharan Africa. Investment in sub-Saharan African countries is lagging vis-à-vis peers such as emerging and developing Asia as well as Latin America and the Caribbean, and the region’s infrastructure is perceived as being of relatively low quality. Improving the efficiency of sizable investment programs in the region could contribute to more solid economic growth and help achieve desired social priorities and development goals. Results point to some variability in public investment efficiency within the region. Comparing efficiency scores across country groups suggests that investment efficiency in sub-Saharan Africa...