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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the dynamic link between financial inclusion and financial sector development (FSD) in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper employs a panel vector autoregressive framework to examine the dynamic link between financial inclusion and FSD in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The findings indicate that there is a reverse causality between FSD and financial inclusion in both the Sub-Saharan Africa countries sample and the full sample. It is evident that financial inclusion is a driver of FSD and vice versa.

The practical implication of this study is that financial inclusion should not only be pursued as a policy objective but it could also be an outcome variable of FSD and vice versa. This implies that African economies and governments in their effort to enhance financial inclusion, FSD can serve as a policy tool. This means that policies aimed at promoting financial inclusion will not impede FSD because the two are complementary. This suggests that we can achieve financial inclusion without sacrificing FSD and vice versa.

This paper provides first empirical evidence of the link between financial inclusion and FSD from the Sub-Saharan Africa perspective using data sourced from World Development Indicators spanning from 1990 to 2014 for 48 Sub-Saharan African economies and 217 economies in the world for the full sample.

This study seeks to examine the relationship between macroeconomic shock indicators, namely geopolitical risk (GPR), global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU) and financial stress (FS), and returns as well as volatilities on seven carefully selected stock markets in Africa. Specifically, the study intends to unravel the co-movement and interdependence between the respective macroeconomic shock indicators and each of the stock markets under consideration across time and frequency.

This study employed wavelet coherence approach to examine the strength and stability of the relationships across different time scales and frequency components, thereby providing valuable insights into specific periods and frequency ranges where the relationships are particularly pronounced.

The study found that GEPU, Financial Stress (FS) and GPR failed to induce significant influence on African stock market returns in the short term (0–4 months band), but tend to intensify in the long-term band (after 6th month). On the contrary, stock market volatilities exhibited strong coherence and interdependence with GEPU, FSI and GPR in the short-term band.

This study happens to be the first of its kind to comprehensively consider how the aforementioned macro-economic shock indicators impact stock markets returns and volatilities over time and frequency. Further, none of the earlier studies has attempted to examine the relationship between macro-economic shocks, stock returns and volatilities in different crisis periods. This study is the first of its kind in to employ data spanning from May 2007 to April 2023, thereby covering notable crisis periods such as global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic episodes.