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on Africa |
| By: | Boamah, Collins |
| Abstract: | The acceleration of digital financial services in Ghana has transformed the country's banking landscape while simultaneously reshaping its financial crime risk profile. Drawing on insights from the Bank of Ghana (BoG) Annual Fraud Reports, Ghana Association of Banks (GAB) Quarterly Fraud Reports, Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) data, and law enforcement sources including the Ghana Police Service, EOCO, and OSP, this paper examines evolving fraud typologies, systemic vulnerabilities, and regulatory expectations within Ghana's banking sector. The findings reveal a structural shift from traditional branch-based fraud to digitally enabled, identitydriven, and cross-border financial crime. The paper argues that regulatory compliance alone is insufficient; instead, a resilience-based, intelligenceled, ecosystem-wide response is required to safeguard financial stability in the digital era. |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:gabpbs:339595 |
| By: | Abayneh Ayele, Hiwot; Margarian, Anne; Weible, Daniela |
| Abstract: | Motivation The high level of regulation has a strong influence on the development of Ethiopia's export- and domestic- oriented coffee value chains, as well as on their ability to participate in Global Value Chains and in domestic value chain development. The fact that Ethiopia's coffee value chains are further differentiated along various dimensions is widely overlooked in the scientific literature. Approach and methods Drawing on expert interviews and other data sources, we identify, describe, and discuss the structure and organisation of the Ethiopian coffee value chains, taking into account institutional conditions and policy frameworks. We also identify relevant institutions and policies involved in these value chains across primary, secondary, and tertiary markets, along with their respective interventions. Findings Our analysis identified four major coffee value chains: formal, informal, domestic, and international chains. Stakeholders' competing goals and conflicts have created a complex structure, as exemplified by the strict market regulations in place. Reforms, such as Ethiopia's monetary policy, have caused foreign exchange and FDI deficits, impacting the coffee sector, which remains the primary source of foreign currency but limits domestic coffee development. This also spurred informal trade for local and cross-border markets. An overvalued currency and cheap imports attract informal traders, as exporters seek foreign currency through coffee, thereby hindering the sector's development. Poor quality control further restricts the competitiveness of domestic chains, favouring small, inefficient, and informal traders. Institutions failed to regulate reforms, such as the 2018 coffee reform, which reduced transparency and undermined trust. Furthermore, the failure of institutions to monitor and regulate policy reform meant that farmers, primary cooperatives, and traders working on quality considered it a less rewarding activity. The Ethiopian coffee market does not function effectively in terms of differentiating and remunerating different product and process qualities. Policy implications The results highlight the need to implement quality control measures at farm level, particularly within the farmer-supplier-exporter chain, in order to utilize the country's potential to produce high-quality coffee for export and develop the domestic value chain. This also calls for designing a system that rewards quality production at all stages of the value chain. Acknowledging the distinct coffee value chains in the country and creating a strategy that considers their variations is crucial. |
| Keywords: | Coffee, value chain analysis, coffee market, institutional environment, Ethiopia |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:jhtiwp:339578 |
| By: | Daas, Yousuf; Dalmon, Danilo Leite |
| Abstract: | South Africa entered the COVID-19 pandemic with one of the world's most unequal labor markets, where racial stratification shaped not only employment access but the distribution of wages within employment. This paper estimates the differential effect of the post-2020 period on monthly wages using seven waves of the Labor Market Dynamics in South Africa (LMDSA) dataset spanning 2017 to 2023. The empirical strategy employs a difference-in-differences design with race-by-post-2020 interaction terms, conditional on province, year-by-quarter, education, industry, and occupation fixed effects, with standard errors clustered at the survey stratum level. The results show that racial wage inequality widened sharply and persistently after 2020 across all subgroups examined. Among wage employees, African/Black workers experienced a relative wage penalty of approximately 37 percent and Colored workers approximately 52 percent. The most striking finding concerns employers: African/Black business owners suffered a relative earnings loss of approximately 59 percent, entirely reversing a modest pre-pandemic advantage, exposing the fragility of post-apartheid entrepreneurial gains. Gender-disaggregated estimates reveal larger conditional penalties for non-White men than women among the employed, though this coexists with documented severe labor force exclusion of women during the crisis. Occupational strata analysis confirms that penalties are present across all skill levels and are not explained by compositional sorting across industries or occupations. These findings are consistent with a structural amplifier interpretation, whereby the pandemic revealed and entrenched pre-existing vulnerabilities in a segmented labor market rather than generating new ones. |
| Date: | 2026–03–20 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:8xrjc_v1 |