No abstract

This study investigates the possibility of spillovers among Sub-Saharan African (SSA) eurobonds from January 2015 to June 2017 using secondary market yields. Ours results indicate significant contagion effects among these bonds, effects that prove sensitive to major economic events and news announcements. They also suggest that less resilient economies transmit more to and receive less spillovers from their peers. SSA eurobond issuers can therefore increase their influence over the performance of their securities on secondary markets by mitigating their vulnerability to these effects. Besides strong macroeconomic fundamentals, an improvement in transparency and information disclosure is required in order to curb the asymmetry of information underlying investors' behavior-based spillovers and contagion, which supports to a certain extent the market discipline hypothesis in the case of SSA eurobonds.

This study investigates the influence of government borrowing through international capital markets on investment dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We apply the synthetic control method to Gabon, Ghana and Senegal to assess whether this kind of government borrowing affects private, public and FDI in these countries using annual data for the period 1995-2017. Our results suggest that government and private investment have not been affected by governments' borrowing through international capital markets, but that the move may have boosted these countries' capacity to attract foreign direct investment. They lend support to the hypothesis that these countries' exposure to international capital markets is an opportunity to register on the investors' radar.