The Transition of the Monetary and Financial Systems of the Portuguese-speaking African Countries: from Colonial to Post-colonial times

A Guiné Portuguesa teve a sua configuração estabelecida pelo Tratado de 12 de maio de 1886 entre Portugal e a França no contexto da conferência de Berlim. O papel do Estado Português foi relevante na autorização da operação de companhias estrangeiras, a par de negócios como o de António Silva Gou-vêa, para a promoção do povoamento pelo comércio organizado. O BNU abriu a sua primeira agência em 1903 em Bolama, então capital administrativa, e a segunda, em 1917, em Bissau. A Casa Gouvêa a operar na Guiné viria a associar-se à Sociedade Geral de Comércio, Indústria e Transportes Lda, da CUF, em 1921. Permitindo o desenvolvimento de uma economia dual de base tribal, muito contribuiu para a monetarização, a estabilidade cambial, e a integração da economia da Guiné na economia global até à sua independência em 1974.

Corporate Finance is a fashionable field in schools of Economics throughout the World. Although the main epistemological break to identify its scientific character may be established in the decade of the 1950s, this paper demonstrates how much developed financial thought there was in Europe before the First World War. Thanks to considerable growth of international trade, corporations, and multinationals (i.e. rising globalization) during this phase of European civilization, Stock Exchanges flourished in all European countries. Philosophers, businessmen, professors, and lawyers disseminated their burgeoning erudition in financial knowledge, and several authors made large contributions in books devoted to legal features of human economic actions, and in textbooks devoted to political economy.

This paper is an exercise of quantitative dynamic analysis applied to bilateral relationships among partners within two monetary union case studies: the Portuguese escudo zone monetary union (EZMU) and the European euro zone monetary union (EMU). Real world data are tackled and measures that are usual in complex system analysis, such as entropy, mutual information, Canberra distance, and Jensen-Shannon divergence, are adopted. The emerging relationships are visualized by means of the multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering computational techniques. Results bring evidence on long-run stochastic dynamics that lead to asymmetric indebtedness mechanisms among the partners of a monetary union and sustainability difficulties. The consequences of unsustainability and disruption of monetary unions have high importance for the discussion on optimal currency areas from a geopolitical perspective.