Enabling stock market development in Africa: A review of the macroeconomic drivers

The article analyzes the influence of inflation on economic growth and substantiates the main directions of increasing the effectiveness of the central bank's anti-inflation policy.
In order to determine the limit of inflation, the excess of which has a negative impact on the economic growth, the relationship is analyzed between the inflation rate and the real GDP growth rate on the basis of IMF statistics using the example of 158 countries. It was determined that in 2010–2017, in the global economy, the 6.0% inflation was the marginal value of the inflation rate, beyond which the economic growth rate declined or slowed down.
Given the inverse relationship between the inflation rate and the real GDP growth rates as well as empirical calculations for the period 1996–2017, the threshold for inflation rate for Ukraine at the level of 4.51% was determined based on empirical calculations for the 1996–2017 period. The results indicate that the National Bank of Ukraine set the inflation target above the level of the calculated threshold inflation.
It has also been established that the link between the rates of nominal GDP growth, as opposed to real GDP, and the inflation rate, is more direct and more tight. It is substantiated that to analyze such dependence it is better to use GDP deflator instead of CPI. The results indicate that deflation constrains economic growth much less than inflation.
In order to increase the effectiveness of the central bank’s pro-cyclical monetary policy aimed at supporting economic growth, the relationship between the rates of real GDP growth and the indicator characterizing the gap between the growth rates of M3 and inflation, which actually reflects the real money supply dynamics, is determined. The results obtained allowed to conclude that in 2009 and 2014-2017, the artificial “squeezing” of the money supply took place in Ukraine, resulting in a decrease in the level of the economy monetization by 22.0% in 2017 compared to 2013.
It has been proved that in order to minimize the negative impact of inflationary processes on economic growth, the policy of the National Bank of Ukraine should be aimed at eliminating the artificial squeezing of the money supply through a reasonable increase in the economy monetization and the implementation of an effective monetary policy.

The main goal of the article is to analyze the role and influence of economic freedom on macroeconomic stability. For this purpose, the authors used the integrated index of economic freedom, calculated by the Heritage Foundation and Democracy Index. It is noted that this index indicator was calculated by the experts from the World Bank using the index of voice and accountability. In the paper, the authors used the multinational panel dataset for 11 countries of the EU for the purpose of checking the correlation between economic freedom, democracy and macroeconomic stability. It should be highlighted that the abovementioned 11 countries are related by the fluctuation of economic growth during the transformation process (1996–2016) from communist party to the democracy and political pluralism. In addition, the authors proposed to add the indicators of political stability and trade openness, which allowed to take into account implementation of flexible macroeconomic instruments, including monetary policy, which towards increasing the economic growth, employment and financial development of the countries. The findings are directed received using the regression equation with fixed and random effects showed the high level of correspondence of the model used with the original observations. Despite the chosen approach to estimate the macroeconomic stability, the findings showed that there is a positive and statistically significant impact of economic freedom and democracy on macroeconomic stability.

The development of the real estate market always goes hand in hand with the fluctuation of the economy. In recent years, this market has experienced many recessions and «freezes» associated with the appearance of a real estate bubble. To approach this issue, this paper studies and gives an overview of the real estate bubble and the impact of monetary policies on the real estate bubble in Vietnam. This paper’s purpose is to identify and measure the influence of monetary policies, including interest rates, credit and money supply, on the real estate bubble in Ha Noi. The vector autoregression model (VAR) is used to test the interaction of the variables in the model. Dickey-Fuller test (DF) is applied to determine the stationarity of the variables, while the Akaike information criterion (AIC), Likelihood Ratio (LR), Final prediction error (FPE), Hannan-Quinn information criterion (HQ) and Schwarz criterion (SC) are used to find optimal lag of the model; then Granger causality test is utilized to determine the two-way correlation between variables. The results showed that the real estate bubble reacted quickly to shocks from macroeconomic factors representing the monetary policy, consisting of interbank interest rates, credit growth, and money supply growth. Thus, it is concluded that monetary policy is not only the cause of formation, but also one of the effective solutions to deflate the real estate bubble.

Acknowledgment
This research is funded by Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) under grant number [B2022-NTH-03].