Reuters - Africa alone

The good news for Africa when the global financial meltdown began was that its financial markets were generally so far behind the rest of the world that groups such as the World Economic Forum reckoned that there was little or no danger. A new paper, posted on the economic research website VoxEU, suggests that that might be a bit too optimistic.

Tilburg University economist and former World Bank official Thorsten Beck – along with the World Bank’s Michael Fuchs and Marilou Uy — write that despite shallow financial markets, sub-Saharan Africa is unlikely to escape the repercussions of the financial crisis. Indeed, they argue that the crisis is threatening what little progress has been made to reverse what they call the alarming superficiality of African finance.