Abstract

Following the successful introduction of the euro in Western Europe, several regional economic blocs in Africa are planning to launch a common currency as an intermediary step towards the emergence of a single currency for the entire continent. The purpose of this dissertation is to tackle several economic issues related to monetary integration and empirically apply it to the context of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). In the first essay, we estimate trade potentials for southern African countries using the gravity model approach. More specifically, we use the level of infra-regional trade as predicted by the gravity model and compared it with the observed trade in order to assess the trade potentials in the region, as well as the South Africa's trade potentials with its SADC partners. Our results demonstrate that the observed trade flows among SADC countries are largely greater than the ones predicted by the empirical model. We also found that other SADC member countries over-trade with respect to South Africa. However, there are still some unexploited trade potentials for several pairs of SADC countries. The second essay deals with the issue of the choice for the optimal nominal currency anchor to which the national currencies of the region have to be pegged to. Using a panel of 63 countries, we obtained OCA indices à la Bayoumi and Eichengreen for SADC countries vis-à-vis five potential nominal anchor currencies, and we find that the optimal nominal currency anchor for these countries is the US dollar. We also find several pairs of SADC countries which are suitable for a common currency on the basis of the estimated OCA indices. In the last essay, we empirically assess the expandability of the CMA within the SADC by investigating the convergence of monetary policies of each SADC member to that of South Africa, a proxy for CMA. Empirical tests show evidence of long-run relationship between South Africa and two countries, namely Botswana and Mauritius suggesting that these countries may able to follow the leadership of the South African Reserve Bank. Following the results of the Granger-causality test, the leadership hypothesis in the strict sense is rejected for the case of Mauritius and Botswana. However, the only other country which shows evidence of following the South Africa's leadership in terms of Granger-causality is Malawi. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]