This paper examines the impact of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative on under five mortality rate (U5MR) in Sub-Saharan Africa. The HIPC Initiative involves debt forgiveness and the redirection of funds that were meant to service external debt towards the provision of social services and poverty reduction in eligible countries. The Initiative is akin to a natural experiment since some countries benefited while some did not, and the timing of debt forgiveness varied across countries. We exploit these variations to identify the impact of HIPC Initiative on child mortality using a dynamic panel data estimator. We find that participation in HIPC Initiative is associated with statistically significant decreases in U5MR. On the other hand, the impact of actual debt cancelled is statistically insignificant.

Social protection is an action taken to reduce vulnerability and deprivation of households in times of need or disasters such as displacement by wars. This study investigates the impact of formal and informal social protection in the process of resettlement of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Northern Uganda. The data for the study come from a survey of randomly selected households which were still in the IDP camps and those that had resettled in their original homes. The methods of estimation applied are ordinary least squares, probit, logistic regressions and propensity score matching. The results show that formal social protection reduces the likelihood of resettlement, while informal social protection encourages it. Thus, there is a need to coordinate the informal and formal support systems when households in distress are being assisted. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We undertake to estimate the effects of real exchange rate misalignment and regional integration on the service sector performance in selected countries from East Africa during the period of 1991–2017. The main findings, based on the traditional Pooled Mean Group ARDL technique as well as the alternative panel Cross-Sectional Autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) approach render support for an undervaluation-led services sector performance as well as the importance of regional integration in the observed linkage. Additional evidence reveals that both the monetary policy and the fiscal policy are key channels via which currency undervaluation impacts on the services sector output. The existence of non-linearities in an inverted U-shaped curve is equally confirmed in the data, where small and moderate undervaluations spur service sector performance just as large undervaluations after some threshold hinder it. Exchange rate volatility is found detrimental to the services sector in the long run. Policies that would help promote the underlying catalysts of undervaluation, curtail exchange rate volatility as well as those that promote deeper regional integration should be strengthened. Likewise, undervaluation policies would yield optimal benefits to the services sector once they are accompanied by well-calculated monetary and fiscal policies.

This paper investigates the direct and the indirect roles of migrant transfers in the saving behaviors of the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries during the period 1997–2018. Using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) panel estimation technique, the results based on the Pooled Mean Group approach provide strong evidence of the importance of inward remittances to savings. On average, an increase in inward remittances by 1% leads to about 0.10% increase in savings ceteris paribus, but the effect is quantitatively larger in the short-run than in the long-run, albeit more significant in the latter case. Quite outstanding here is the observation of the detrimental role of remittances on savings in the long-run once governance quality in aggregate and disaggregated forms are controlled for, suggesting possible adverse effects of remittances for economic development in the long-run. Nevertheless, macroeconomic stability as well as institutional quality, foreign direct investment (FDI), and foreign aid were found to be important moderators of the remittances–savings linkage. For the latter two variables, emphasis is on complementarity rather than substitutability between remittances, aid, and FDI. While in the short-run remittances appear to perform better in enhancing savings in countries where an improvement in corruption control is visible, political rights and civil liberties compliment migrant transfers in propelling savings in the long- and short-runs, respectively. Moreover, remittances are found to play a major role in ameliorating the adverse effects of the financial crisis on savings, just as they are observed to function as a lifeline to savings in countries with increasing macroeconomic instability in form of inflation, in the long-run. The findings are robust to the use of alternative estimation techniques. Policy recommendations are suggested.