This research project is focused on the following key activities:
 
a) The development of an approach to investigate and identify the most realistic export opportunities for exporters and importers between South Africa and Tunisia;
 
b) The application of a methodology referred to as the TRADE-Decision Support Model (DSM) for the identification of realistic export opportunities;
 
c) A TRADE-DSM needs to be constructed for Tunisia – we already have an existing model for South Africa constructed at the North-West University;
 

The main purpose of this study is to study the impact of Regional Integration on the attractiveness of Foreign Direct Investment in Sub-Saharan African countries. This investigation was carried out using a panel data analysis, over a sample of 30 countries for a time-period of 23 years, from 1996 to 2018. To account for the modelling of dynamics and to establish the short-run and long-run relationships between Foreign Direct Investment, the Unrestricted Vector Autoregressive model was employed.

The “Chinafrica” relationship has recently been the focus of several international political discourses, whereby the motives behind recent breathtakingly fast upsurge of Chinese FDI in the African continent is being questioned. Hence, the purpose of this study is to analyse why China has been exponentially investing into Africa and it examines the determinants of Chinese FDI in Africa. The conceptual model is based upon the UNCTAD framework of FDI and the investigation is carried out using a balanced panel data from a sample of 25 African countries over the period 2005-2015.

This study develops and tests a structural model that incorporates the determinants of SME financial performance in Mauritius. Data were collected from 384 tourism SME owners using a structured questionnaire. The results indicate that managerial capability has a significant positive effect on SME performance and is in turn influenced by managers’ autonomy and competence. The study does find a significant relationship between innovation capability and SME performance.

The study employs the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to examine the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) in the mining sector on the Zimbabwe economy, while controlling for both non-mining FDI and domestic investment. Using data over the period 1988–2018, this research results show that foreign direct investment in the mining sector has a signifcant positive relationship with the country’s GDP in the long run. Mining FDI is revealed to have relatively higher efects as compared to FDI in non-mining sector and domestic investment.

This paper employs an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to examine the long-run and short-run determinants of the real effective exchange rate in fifteen Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries using annual data spanning from 1980 to 2015. Not surprisingly, the findings show that the determinants vary from one country to another. Terms of trade, GDP per capita, net foreign assets and trade openness are found to be key factors that cause fluctuations in the real effective exchange rate of most of these countries in the long-run.

The emergence of China in the international trading system has shifted its gravity center, as the country has become one of the mayor actors in international economic relations. Through the subscription of preferential agreements, China is building a network of strategic partnerships worldwide, including Latin America. The purpose of this paper is to answer the questions: Do free trade agreements (FTAs) between China and Latin American countries contribute to expand trade flows and enhance products diversification?
 

For years, the United Kingdom (UK) has been one of the top export destinations for Mauritius. The Brexit referendum, held in June 2016, not only affected the UK economy but also resulted in several economic repercussions worldwide, including Mauritius. To this end, this article aims at investigating the impact of the Brexit referendum on the Mauritius-UK trade sector. In particular, we examine its potential impact on the Mauritius-UK export market during the post-Brexit referendum period (2016Q3-2019Q4) using the recently developed Bayesian structural time-series models.