The economic landscape of most Africa countries depends essentially on the dynamics of climate change. Key sectors driving their economic performance and livelihoods such as agriculture, forestry, energy, tourism, coastal and water resources are highly vulnerable to climate change. This paper examines the empirical linkage between economic growth and climate change in Africa. Using annual data for 34 countries from 1961 to 2009, we find a negative impact of climate change on economic growth in Africa. Our results show that a 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature reduces GDP growth by 0.27 percentage point for the region. A higher impact of 0.41 percentage point was however observed when the sample period was reduced to 1961 to 2000 indicating a reduction in the influence possibly given increase in efforts towards adapting to climate change. The two largest economies in the Sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa and Nigeria) played some significant role in ameliorating the negative economic impact of climate change in the region. Some policy options emerged from this study. First, mainstreaming climate change adaptation into National Development Strategy and budgets could promote proactive engagement on the formulation and implementation of climate change adaptation strategy. Second, the potential of regional or multiple countries approach to climate change adaptation is high due to possibility of economies of scale. Third, the role of South Africa and Nigeria in cushioning the negative impact of climate change on other African countries tends to suggest the benefit of regional integration in addressing this challenge.

A sample of U.S. consumers were surveyed in a choice based experiment in the Fall of 2005 and Spring 2006 to elicit Consumers' preferences for quality attributes in beef products. Based on the resulting data, a random coefficients logit model is estimated, and Consumers' willingness to pay for these quality attributes in beef products is obtained. The results indicate that consumers have strong valuation for traceability, grass-fed, and U.S. origin attributes in a standard rib-eye steak and are willing to pay a premium for these attributes.

Understanding the factors that are important in determining poverty and inequality is one of the steps in the fight to eradicate poverty in the world. This is particularly so for African countries because when compared to other regions, Africa has the largest concentration of people living below the poverty line. This article examines the effect of financial development as measured by private credit and broad money (M2) on poverty and inequality in African countries. The empirical results indicate that financial development has not had a significant effect on poverty and inequality in African countries. Macroeconomic variables such as low inflation and trade openness were found to be statistically significant, implying that they can help reduce the level of poverty and inequality. Our results confirm the deficiencies in African financial systems and highlight the fact that more efforts need to be done to improve access of poor households and SMEs to financial services.

This paper seeks to provide an explanation for the relationship between domestic maize price in South Africa and world maize prices in order to evaluate co-movement and transmission of world prices to domestic prices in Sub-Sahara African countries. This is done by comparing nested and non-nested models that capture different forms of nonlinearity in the price spread. Adopting a Bayesian approach that allows for comparison of models using Bayes Factor, we found that the relationship between South African price and world price for maize indicates the presence of nonlinearity in price transmission with three regimes that is triggered by the price spread in previous period.JEL Codes: C5, C11, Q0, Q13, Q18