Financial literacy enables owner-managers of SMEs to understand and assess their own financial needs and make rational financial decisions. The paper explores the financial literacy of owner-managers of SMEs in the Cape Coast Metropolis and how such literacy influences the performance of their businesses. The study population were owner-managers of registered SMEs in the Cape Coast Metropolis from the National Board for Small and Medium Enterprise, out of which a sample of 132 was selected through the simple random sampling technique. The data was analyzed using Structural Equation Model. The results showed a positive relationship between financial literacy and the firm’s financial performance (t = 35.631, p < .00). The paper recommends that policy makers should specifically design a program and platform targeted at further enhancing the financial literacy level of these owner-managers to help improve the performance of their firms.

This study explores how global economic policy uncertainty (EPU) shocks comove with stock returns (SR) of eight African countries—Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia. The study employed daily data from December 2010 to December 2019 using wavelet coherence analysis. The results showed that global EPU comoves with most of the SR of African markets and was concentrated in the longer term, especially during the period between 2011 and 2019, although not substantially. The findings indicate that short-term investments in African stocks are less susceptible to global economic policy uncertainty. It is recommended that foreign investors could hedge agaist policy uncertainties by investing in stock listed in African Stock exchanges while appropriate country-level policies are deployed to manage long-term effect of EPU.

This study provides an analysis of chaotic information transmission from the COVID-19 pandemic to global equity markets in a novel denoised frequency domain entropy framework. The current length of the pandemic data offers the opportunity to examine its role in the asymmetric behaviour patterns of investors according to time horizons and the diversification potentials available to them. We employ the total daily global confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 27 equity indices from December 31, 2019, to April 18, 2021. Our results corroborate the idea that diversification potentials are stronger in the short to medium term. The Global Index (higher risk) and Canada and New Zealand (lower risk) remain at both ends to pair some other equities to offer diversification prospects because of the transmission of information from COVID-19 to the selected equity markets. In addition, we provide the source of these diversification prospects as information flow rather than transmission of shocks, which is common in the literature. Furthermore, our results suggest detailed levels of risk (lower vis-à-vis higher) in the situation where they have been stripped of the noise in the market. The findings allow both investors and policymakers to make informed decisions based on the time horizons since the pandemic communicates different chaotic information with the lapse of time. This is imperative to avoid the negative consequences of the increasing infection rate on global stock markets.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the role external debt and foreign direct investment play in influencing financial development in Africa. Design/methodology/approach: Annual data on external debt, foreign direct investment and financial development were extracted from the World Bank World Development Indicators from 2002 to 2015. The data employed were analysed within causal research design and the dynamic panel using generalized method of moment estimation approach. Findings: The findings revealed that external debt and foreign direct investment have a significant positive relationship with financial development in African economies. Governments of the sampled economies should enact policies that would help attract high level of foreign direct investment as it contributes positively to financial development. Finally, governments of the sampled African economies should ensure foreign direct investment and external funds borrowed are channelled to productive sectors. Originality/value: The paper analysed the relationship between external debt, FDI inflows and financial sector development. The paper is the first in terms of such analysis within the framework of the dual-gap framework, which is the first time in these kinds of studies. Previous studies have concentrated on the effect of financial sector on FDI and not the other way around.

This paper employed wavelet coherence and partial wavelet coherence to investigate the time‐frequency effect of global economic policy uncertainty on the comovement of five agricultural commodities such as maize, oat, rice, soybean, and wheat using monthly data from January 1997 to December 2019. In general, we observed heterogeneity in comovement structures of the agricultural commodities market at different time‐frequency scales which are profound at high frequencies from the bivariate wavelet coherence. The partial wavelet coherence analysis shows that global economic policy uncertainty is a driver of agricultural commodity market connectedness. This implies that extreme changes in economic policy uncertainty have the tendency to influence commodity price comovement. This poses risk to the stability of the agricultural commodities market, which requires the policymaker’s intervention to protect against the spillover risk contagion effect in uncertain times.