| AUTHOR | Shiv Bakrania and Brian Lucas |
| ORGANIZATION | Governance and Social Development Resource Centre |
| TYPE | Working Paper |
| DATE | 2009 |
| TOPIC | Economic crisis and recovery |
| LANGUAGE | English |
The global financial crisis was triggered by the bursting of the United States housing bubble in 2007 and the reverberations of this are now being felt throughout the world. The crisis was greatly exacerbated by the behaviour of banks which has inevitably made the position of any country that has borrowed money worse off. Sub-Saharan Africa was largely insulated from the initial stages of the financial crisis as the majority of the countries in the region are de-linked from the international financial markets. However, with the worsening of the global financial and economic crisis, the region as a whole has now been exposed to the downturn, and growth estimates have been continually lowered from 5 percent in 2008 to 1.7 percent in April 2009 (IMF, 2009).
