African Economic and Management Review

From Collateral to Cash: A Legally Screened Finite-Horizon Decision Protocol

Zhao Zhao — 2026-10-29

Recovering legal title to collateral does not guarantee that a lender will collect cash. This conceptual study combines a legal-admissibility screen with a finite-horizon selling rule that permits repeated auctions or negotiated sales when their completion windows and legal conditions fit the time remaining. Illustrative calculations distinguish conditional proceeds, attempt costs, holding outlays, completion probabilities and cash at the cutoff. With two years available, auction-first yields 54.31 index units against 53.08 for direct sale; at 1.70 years, direct sale yields 51.13 against 50.21 for auction. The reversal results from packing assumed 0.50- and 0.85-year attempt windows, not evidence of auction superiority. A separately costed rental branch yields 46.86 at a hypothetical sale-completion probability of 0.70; matching the best two-year selling policy requires approximately 0.90. An algebraic decomposition identifies when continuation outweighs direct sale’s single-attempt advantage. China’s historical repossessed-asset rules and Ghana’s distinct default-notice, registry, valuation and realisation provisions supply conditional legal screens. The framework separates financial scheduling from legally completed disposal. No actual recoveries or causal effects are estimated.

Population Growth, Cereal Yield, Land Availability and Real GDP per Capita in Five Agrarian Economies

Essa Jamili — 2026-10-29

This study examines within-country associations among population growth, cereal yield, arable land per person, agricultural land share, and real GDP per capita in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Niger, Tanzania, and Malawi. Descriptive comparisons use the available World Bank World Development Indicators series, while the principal fixed-effects analysis covers a balanced five-country panel for 2002–2022 (105 country-year observations). The principal two-way fixed-effects model finds no statistically detectable population-growth association with log real GDP per capita (β = 0.0118, 95% CI [−0.0661, 0.0898], p = .766). Log cereal yield is positively associated with GDP per capita in the principal model (β = 0.2864, 95% CI [0.1225, 0.4503], p = .0006), but this association is not statistically significant when country-specific linear trends are included (β = 0.0634, p = .133). The arable-land-per-person coefficient is positive in the principal model (β = 0.9063) but reverses sign under country-specific trends (β = −0.7186, p = .039). Excluding Afghanistan changes the population-growth estimate to −0.1617 (p = .013), indicating substantial country sensitivity. The interaction between population growth and cereal yield is imprecise and statistically insignificant (β = 0.1234, 95% CI [−0.1610, 0.4077], p = .395). These observational estimates are exploratory associations, not causal effects. The descriptive coexistence of declining arable land per person and rising cereal yields in four countries is not evidence that population pressure caused intensification; Niger’s yield series differs. The study therefore documents heterogeneous patterns and specification-sensitive associations rather than adjudicating between Malthusian and Boserupian mechanisms.

Intra-African Agricultural Trade and Food Availability: Product-Level Panel Evidence

Maminiaina Ramaroson — 2026-10-29

This paper asks whether a larger intra-African share of food imports is associated with
higher national food availability and with less volatile availability. We merge BACI
bilateral trade flows with FAO Food Balance Sheets in a panel of 43 African importers and 81 product
units (37,102 observations, 2010 to 2023). The outcome is ln(1 + food supply quantity in kg per
person per year); models use country-product and year fixed effects, country-clustered errors and
wild bootstrap inference; fixed-effects Poisson (PPML) and weighted estimates serve as sensitivity
checks. Comparisons across country-product pairs show a positive association (+1.8% in 1
+ availability per 10 percentage points), which vanishes within pairs (-0.11%; 95% CI -0.30% to
+0.08%, on the same scale), that is -0.002 kg per person per year (95% CI -0.005 to +0.002) at the
median availability of 0.73 kg. A zero-inclusive PPML estimator gives -0.41% in availability (95% CI
-0.84% to +0.02%). Slopes differ across categories (p = 0.018), but negative estimates for oils and
pulses do not survive multiplicity adjustment. Supplier concentration is not significantly related to
volatility. These null results do not show that supplier origin cannot matter. To our
knowledge, few studies relate the supplier composition of imports to product-level availability in
Africa. Within pairs, availability is positively associated with import volumes, partly by
accounting construction, but not detectably with their supplier composition; integration may not be
well judged by its share alone, and monitoring could usefully track availability. The findings do not
evaluate trade facilitation, sourcing schemes or reserves.