This paper uses a dataset of Zimbabwean migrants living in South Africa to examine the determinants of the probability of their returning to their country of origin. It analyses migrants' return migration intentions using a logistic regression that examines 10 demographic and socioeconomic factors. Six factors – reason for migrating, the number of dependants supported in the home country, the level of education, economic activity in the host country, the level of income and the duration of stay in the host country – are found to be statistically significant determinants of the return migration intentions. The main policy implication of these findings is that the chances of attracting back skills are high if political and economic stability can be achieved.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the landscape of financial services in Africa through the prism of a selection of research papers. Design/methodology/approach: This is a review of literature that focusses on access to financial services (i.e. financial inclusion) and empirical findings from research papers in this issue of the journal. Findings: The landscape of financial services in Africa is as heterogeneous as the countries comprising the continent. Common features include low levels of financial inclusion, low financial literacy, constrained access to credit, costly credit when available, gender discrimination in account ownership, and use and inefficient foreign exchange markets. Nevertheless, there are promising innovations, especially the mobile money innovation, which have the potential to foster more inclusive financial systems. Originality/value: All the papers in this volume are based on original research shedding new insights on various aspects of financial services in Africa.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of individual characteristics (such as sex, age, education and income) on the likelihood of account ownership and use in selected Sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies. Account use is operationalized into two constructs namely the use of account to save and the frequency of account use. Design/methodology/approach: Data from 18,000 individuals from 18 SSA economies are used for the analysis. These data are sourced from the World Bank’s Global Findex database. Simple probit and selection models are employed as econometric tools. Findings: Account ownership and use is found to be higher among males, middle aged, high income and educated individuals. The marginal effect of income and education is most pronounced suggesting more policy attention is required in respect of the two factors. Practical implications: Due to causality issues between financial inclusion and income, addressing the plight of the poor in financial inclusion projects will be a continuing challenge for policy makers. Originality/value: It supplements the dearth of econometric studies conducted on the topic. Furthermore, regional specific factors affect the generality of results which calls for such type of studies.

In this paper we investigate the dynamic relationship between bank credit and agricultural output in South Africa using time series data from 1970 to 2011. Using the Johansen cointegration test, we observe bank credit and agricultural output to be cointegrated. In the long run we find credit and capital formation to have significant positive impact on agricultural output. Employing an ECM, we find that, in the short run, bank credit has a negative impact on agricultural output reflecting the uncertainties of institutional credit in South Africa. However, the ECM coefficient shows that agricultural GDP rapidly adjusts to short term disturbances indicating that there is no room for tardiness in the agricultural sector. The absence of institutional credit will be immediately replaced by availability of other credit facilities from non-institutional sources so that there is no room for possible non-application of intermediate inputs. Conventional Granger causality tests show uni-directional causality from (1) bank credit to agricultural output growth; (2) agricultural output to capital formation; (3) agricultural output to labour; (4) capital formation to credit; (5) capital formation to labour, and a bi-directional causality between credit and labour. Noteworthy is that for the agricultural sector the direction of causality is from finance to growth, i.e., supply-leading, whereas at the macroeconomic level the direction of causality is from economic growth to finance, i.e., demand-leading.

The paper presents a chronological unravelling of the political economy of Zimbabwe. It commences by giving an analysis of economic performance within a framework of four periods, namely, (i) the pre-independence period, (ii) the post-independence period of controls, (iii) the economic liberalization period and (iv) the economic crisis period. It proceeds to discuss the deterioration in economic performance emanating from inappropriate macroeconomic policies followed post-independence. The role of the monetary policy regime in exacer-bating macroeconomic instability is also highlighted. Furthermore, the system of governance is noted to be another significant contributory factor to economic decline. One important insight from the analysis is that the economy had been operating sub-optimally throughout the post-independence period, a factor which is often ignored in research on Zimbabwe. Furthermore, if we take into account the lacklustre performance during the pre-independence period when it was under international sanctions, Zimbabwe could be said to have had ‘five lost decades’ –the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and the decade commencing in the year 2000.

The paper tests for mean reversion, that is, purchasing power parity (PPP), in the bilateral real exchange rate series of the South African rand against those of the dollar, the pound sterling, the euro and the yen, these being the currencies of the country's main trading partners. The relevance of considering structural breaks in PPP tests is demonstrated. Using standard unit root tests without considering structural breaks, one is unable to reject the null hypothesis of a unit root in the exchange rate series. The additive outlier model clearly demonstrates the importance of multiple sudden structural breaks and supports the stationarity of the rand's bilateral real exchange rates. As expected the innovative outlier model, which seeks to suggest gradual shifts, only identifies a limited number of breaks and does not support mean reversion.