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This paper aims to empirically investigate the impact that financial sector reforms have on foreign direct investment (FDI) in Ghana.

Composite financial sector reform index was constructed, which was made up of various forms of reform policies that were implemented from 1987 to 2016. The auto regressive distributed lag bounds test was used to establish cointegration between variables. Having controlled for other covariates that affect FDI such as trade openness, exchange rate, gross domestic product per capita, inflation and by using the fully modified ordinary least squares method, the estimations are robust as it uses a semi-parametric correction to avoid for any possible issues of endogeneity and serial correlation.

Results from the paper reveal that financial sector reform deepening boost FDI with a 2.167% increase in FDI following from a unit percentage improvement of the financial sector reforms. Considering the various categories of reforms, the results reveal that competitive reforms have the highest impact on FDI followed by privatization reforms with positive and significant elasticity coefficients of 2.174% and 0.726%, respectively. Behavioral reforms revealed a positive effect on FDI, albeit insignificant.

The paper contributes to policy by providing empirical evidence on the effect of financial sector reform on FDI inflows in Ghana. As far as the review of literature is concerned, this paper provides the foremost empirical evidence on the subject with sole emphasis on Ghana. Thus, this paper suggests the deepening of the financial sector reforms, improving competition and maintaining macroeconomic stability.

This paper seeks to examine the effect of monetary policy rate (MPR) on the lending rates of commercial banks in Ghana.

The paper employed the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model as well as the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model econometric techniques on a quarterly time series data from 2002 to 2018.

The ARDL results revealed that, MPR has a positive and significant effect on lending rate in the long and short run. Although there exists a direct relationship between MPR and lending rate, from the NARDL revealed an asymmetric effect of MPR on lending rate to the effect that, lending rate in Ghana responds more to positive shock (a rise in MPR) compared to a negative shock (a decrease in MPR) both in the long and short run.

The paper contributes to policy and literature in Ghana by providing empirical evidence on the asymmetric effect that MPR has on lending rates in Ghana. The paper recommends among others, the establishment of a rating system of banks according to their monetary policy compliance, where highly rated banks could have for instance a reduction on borrowed reserves from the central bank.

This paper assesses the impact of tax reforms on tax revenue mobilisation in Ghana.

The autoregressive distributed lag model together with dynamic ordinary least squares and fully modified least squares techniques were employed on a time-series data spanning from 1980–2018. Exploiting data from IMFs monitoring of fund arrangements database, an index of tax reforms is constructed as a function of the number of successfully implemented tax-related reforms and policy measures per year over the study period.

Having established the presence of co-integration between tax revenue and its determinants, this paper finds strong evidence that tax-related reforms exert positive and significant impact on tax revenue generation in Ghana. Among other covariates, the results show that the tax base (real GDP), public debt and education (human capital index) significantly boosts tax revenue in the long run.

The success of tax reforms in boosting revenue mobilisation has been examined in light of the buoyancy and elasticity of the tax system in Ghana, albeit with little emphasis on the extent to which tax reforms contribute to tax revenue mobilisation from econometric perspective. This paper fills this gap in the literature by analysing the impact of tax reforms on tax revenue mobilisation in Ghana. As a recommendation, well-designed and implemented tax reforms and policies aimed at increasing the tax base, education and effective utilisation of funds from public debt promise to be instrumental in boosting tax revenue in Ghana.

The purpose of this paper is to find the effect of quality of tax administration on firm productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Also, the paper investigates whether the effect of quality of tax administration on firm productivity varies with respect to firms of different ages and sizes.

The paper uses the World Bank Enterprise Survey data for 6,718 firms across 40 countries in SSA. By employing the least square method, the estimations are robust since country and industry heterogeneity are controlled, as well as other covariates that affect firm productivity such as capital, technology, business environment, infrastructure and firm characteristics.

Results of the paper reveal that productivity of firms reduces with poor quality of tax administration. With positive and significant interaction term coefficient between smaller firms and quality of tax administration, the findings also reveal that smaller firms do benefit in the presence of poor quality of tax administration than larger firms.

The study contributes to policy by providing empirical evidence on the impact that quality of tax administration has on firm productivity. Empirically, the paper is also the first to assess the effect of tax administration quality on firm productivity with sole emphasis on SSA (to the best of the authors’ knowledge after review of literature). The paper suggests reforms and improvement in tax administration so as to reduce compliance burden and improve productivity.