This study introduces an index for measuring financial development and a set of six indices representing key characteristics of the financial systems in 38 sub-Saharan African countries. The results show that these countries have made good progress in improving and modernizing their financial systems during the last decade, particularly with regard to financial liberalization and the adoption of indirect instruments of monetary policy. In many countries, however, the range of financial products remains extremely limited, interest rate spreads are wide, capital adequacy ratios are insufficient, judicial loan recovery is a problem, and the share of nonperforming loans is large.

The paper estimates Angola’s equilibrium parallel market real exchange rate during the 1992–98 period. Using standard integration/co-integration techniques, the results fail to support the purchasing power parity hypothesis and indicate that two exogenous variables—the price of oil and the foreign interest rate—are able to explain most of the variation in the real exchange rate during the last seven years. These results contrast with the tenet that the parallel market exchange rate in Angola is solely influenced by monetary developments.