One of the issues to emerge at CTA’s value chains conference, ‘Making the Connection’, held last November, was the importance of devoting greater efforts to promoting national and regional markets in ACP countries. Governments, development partners and even the private sector have been overly focussed on selling to developed country export markets, which are highlycompetitive and restrictive. Six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies over the last decade are in Africa and, as wealth has increased, food import bills have been skyrocketing. If farmers are to benefit from opportunities presented by the growing food demand from urban populations, marketing channels between rural areas and cities must be significantly improved.

The issues of developing country debt crises, increased volatility and risk, and the determination of market liquidity are high on the agendas of policy makers, market participants and researchers in the area of financial markets. These issues are also of major importance to regulators and exchange officials. This book contains a collection of eigh

The paper discusses a model in which growth is a negative function of fiscal burden. Moreover, growth discontinuously switches from high to low as the fiscal burden reaches a critical level. The paper provides an overview of key elements of corporate bankruptcy codes and practice around the world that are relevant to the debate on sovereign debt restructuring. It also describes the broad trends in international financial integration for a sample of industrial countries and explains the cross-country and time-series variation in the size of international balance sheets.

The lasting turmoil associated with the unprecedented pandemic, triggered by the novel corona virus COVID-19, has dragged the world into a mud of uncertainty. Fiscal stimulation, interest rate cuts, global supply-chain redeployment, "pandemic bond" and circuit breakers kicked in and the world is responding to this great challenge. But how can finance and economic research help the world under such circumstances? This book dwells on this new area of research and tries to understand how pandemics impact the economic and financial ecosystem of both emerging and advanced economies. Lessons learnt from the experience of previous pandemics maybe presented and discussed through drawing on policy lessons to date. By gathering research on political economy, geopolitical issues, behavioral finance, international institutional responses and medical and health issues resulting from pandemics, the chapters in this edited volume help in expanding the knowledge of social and economic consequences of the pandemic as well as set the foundation for future research. This book would benefit scholars, policy makers and entrepreneurs worldwide as a valuable archive of research on pandemics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Emerging Markets Finance and Trade.