This paper examines the relative importance of the global and regional markets for financial markets in developing countries, particularly during the US financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. We examine the way in which the degree of regional (seven African markets combined), global (China, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US), commodity (gold and petroleum), and nominal effective exchange rate (Euro and US dollar) spillovers to individual African countries evolve during the two crises through the econometric method introduced by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012). We find that African markets are most severely affected by spillovers from global markets and modestly from commodity and currency markets. Conversely, the regional spillovers within Africa are smaller than the global ones and are insulated from the global crises. We also find that the aggregated spillover effects of European countries to the African markets exceeded that of the US even at the wake of the US financial crisis.

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ACL-4International audienceThis paper compares different nominal anchors to promote internal and external competitiveness in the case of a fixed exchange rate regime for the future single regional currency of the Economic Community of the West African States (ECOWAS). We use counterfactual analyses and estimate a model of dependent economy for small commodity exporting countries. We consider four foreign anchor currencies: the US dollar, the euro, the yen and the yuan. Our simulations show little support for a dominant peg in the ECOWAS area if they pursue several goals: maximizing the export revenues, minimizing their variability, stabilizing them and minimizing the real exchange rate misalignments from the fundamental value

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