Real interest rate differentials and the real exchange rate: Evidence from four African countries

During the early 1990s much has been written about the return of foreign private capital to many of the larger Asian and Latin American countries. However, until 1992 there was little evidence that countries in sub-Saharan Africa were participating in this phenomenon. In this paper we use variance decompositions and impulse responses from vector autoregressions to shed light on the possible causes and consequences of capital inflows to four countries: Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. We use trend-cycle decompositions to provide evidence linking the appreciation of the real exchange rate to periods of heavy capital inflows. We show that domestic real interest rates have played an important role in explaining the recent behavior of the real exchange rate. In particular, we trace the rise in domestic nominal and real interest rates to policies designed to liberalize the domestic financial sector and attempts to curb the monetary expansion associated with the capital inflows through sterilized intervention.capital flows real exchange rate interest rates

Non-monotonic long memory dynamics in black-market premia

The dynamic response of Black market premia to domestic shocks is an important issue in the design and implementation of stabilization and reform programs. We use a vector autoregressive fractionally integrated model to provide new evidence on the dynamics of the official and Black market exchange rates. We show that the official and Black market exchange rates in Hungary are cointegrated with a negative fractional order ofintegration in the cointegrating residuals. The new empirical finding means that the cointegrating residuals are positively autocorrelated in the short run due to autoregressive dynamics, but are negatively autocorrelated in the long run. The rich and complex dynamics of the premia suggests the existence of what we call long memory non-monotonicity.Foreign exchange rates ; Vector autoregression

Enteroaggregative Escherichia coli: An Emerging Enteric Food Borne Pathogen

Enteroaggregative Escherichia coli (EAEC) are quite heterogeneous category of an emerging enteric pathogen associated with cases of acute or persistent diarrhea worldwide in children and adults, and over the past decade has received increasing attention as a cause of watery diarrhea, which is often persistent. EAEC infection is an important cause of diarrhea in outbreak and non-outbreak settings in developing and developed countries. Recently, EAEC has been implicated in the development of irritable bowel syndrome, but this remains to be confirmed. EAEC is defined as a diarrheal pathogen based on its characteristic aggregative adherence (AA) to HEp-2 cells in culture and its biofilm formation on the intestinal mucosa with a “stacked-brick” adherence phenotype, which is related to the presence of a 60 MDa plasmid (pAA). At the molecular level, strains demonstrating the aggregative phenotype are quite heterogeneous; several virulence factors are detected by polymerase chain reaction; however, none exhibited 100% specificity. Although several studies have identified specific virulence factor(s) unique to EAEC, the mechanism by which EAEC exerts its pathogenesis is, thus, far unknown. The present review updates the current knowledge on the epidemiology, chronic complications, detection, virulence factors, and treatment of EAEC, an emerging enteric food borne pathogen