Monetary policy and macroeconomic management in Africa

In recent years, African countries have had to deal with severe economic pressures, from the sharp decline in global commodity prices from 2015, the Covid-19 pandemic and associated global recession and, as the pandemic was passing, the effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Despite this, early assessments point to the fact that while the challenges have been severe, macroeconomic policy responses—in the monetary, exchange rate and fiscal policy domains—have been strong and equal to the task. In this chapter I describe how this has come about. I describe the emergence, from unpromising beginnings, of macroeconomic policy frameworks that were initially explicitly designed and heavily promoted by the IMF, but have ended up playing a critical role in the quiet revolution in macroeconomic management in Africa.