This paper analyses the role of infrastructure availability, particularly with respect to transportation, in improving the investment climate for and in determining the attractiveness of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. The study is initially based on the small island developing state of Mauritius for the period 1960-2004. Using an ARDL approach, transport infrastructure availability is seen to have contributed to the relative attractiveness of the country towards FDI and such is also the case for non-transport infrastructure. Moreover, the presence of dynamism and endogeneity is also established in FDI modelling. The analysis was then extended for the case of a sample of 20 African economies over the period 1986-2000. Using panel data framework, the fixed effect model estimated a positive and significant coefficient for transport infrastructure, implying that foreign direct investors are sensitive to transport capital. The other type of infrastructure is also judged to be important by these investors, though to a slightly lesser extent than transport. These findings supplement the existing literature on the determinant of FDI. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper focuses on investigating the importance of transportation infrastructure in the overall attractiveness of a destination. It extends a classical demand for international tourism function to include transport infrastructure, as measured by proxies of land and air transport, as additional and separate inputs in a panel data framework for the case of island economies. Due to the possibility of reputation effects in tourism, the study also employs dynamic panel data estimates for a sample of island economies. Results from the analysis show tourists are sensitive to both types of transport infrastructure. Disaggregated studies further show that this is more pronounced for top and renowned island destination cases. The study also confirms the existence of persistence effects and repeat tourism for the latter destinations.

This paper sheds light on the income elasticity of health care expenditure in Africa. The existing literature has to date focused on developed countries due to scarcity of health expenditure data in developing countries. We herein exploit panel data techniques, combining time-series and cross-section data, which enable a substantial increase in testing power. Income elasticity of health care expenditure for 28 African countries over the decade 1991-2000 is investigated. In addition to aggregate health expenditure, we model public and private health expenditures separately. In both the short-run and longrun, public health expenditure is found to be a luxury while private health expenditure a necessity. This is not too surprising in the context of Africa, where the public sector has to strive hard to provide basic health care to the poor majority but where a rich minority can easily afford hi-tech private health care. Furthermore the income elasticity of public health expenditure is found to be pro-cyclical while that of private health expenditure is counter-cyclical, thereby reinforcing our previous finding.

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Using monthly data over the period January 1976-November 2002, the present paper detects significant threshold non-linearities in the inflation rates of three emerging countries, namely India, Singapore and South Africa. A two-regime self-exciting threshold autoregressive (SETAR) model of inflation, constituting a significant improvement over the corresponding linear AR model, is estimated for these countries. Singapore is shown to have a much lower implied equilibrium inflation rate than India, while there is a possibility of seasonal inflation equilibria for South Africa.