Forecasting COVID-19 Pandemic and Capital Market Efficiency in Africa

Abstract

Despite a large and growing list of studies on COVID-19 across space and time and on heterogeneous social, environmental and welfare issues, the empirical relations on the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic and Africa’s market capitalization objectives remain dimly discerned. Even more worrisome is Africa, where the condition for growth and development has not been adequately fulfilled. This structural ambiguity calls for a policy document that is evidence-based to reach conclusions to aid the containment, risk analysis, structures and features of the deadly and fast-spreading disease. This study employed negative binomial and the Poisson regression to establish the contemporaneous influence of COVID-19 pandemic on market capitalization capabilities in Africa. Health data from various reports of the World Health Organization (WHO) is regressed on the all-share index from World Development Indicators (WDI) to establish a clear line of thought. It is found that the growth of confirmed cases and attributable deaths are inversely related to the growth in market capitalization in Africa. The findings from this study show that Africa market capitalization is inversely related to total growth in the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and attributable COVID-19 deaths. This leads to the assertion that Africa’s capital market is fast nosediving in the time of COVID-19 due to global uncertainties caused by the pandemic. With no known cure or vaccine procedure discovered yet, the global uncertainty around the novel coronavirus disease will lead to approximately 0.56 percentage decrease in market capitalization in Africa. To this end, emphases must be laid on identifying and including non-traditional sources of financing strictly tied to projects that could encourage institutional investors. It is therefore equally imperative for Africa to form a formidable and integrated capital market among themselves.  Keywords: market capitalization; COVID-19 pandemic, negative binomial Regression, poisson, Regression, Africa JEL Classification: C10, C31, G15, I12