The African Review of Economics and Finance (AREF) is the leading peer-reviewed journal of African economies, economics and finance. The journal acknowledges that the word 'economics' is plural and all economies are positioned, situated, and embedded in particular societies. Therefore, how the economy is studied must necessarily be plural. From this perspective, the journal welcomes high quality articles in theoretical and empirical economics, be they orthodox, heterodox, or economics as an interdisciplinary social science, with special emphasis on African economies and/or how they relate to other economies in Africa or the rest of the world. There is no limit on the topics of interest. Contributions can be either innovation in economic theory or rigorous new applications of existing theory in areas such as behavioural economics and decision theory, game theory, general equilibrium theory, contract theory, public finance, financial economics, industrial organisation, labour economics, political economy of development, urban and regional political economy, and agrarian political economy.
At the same time AREF publishes papers of high quality dealing with the confrontation of relevant economic theory with observed data through the use of adequate econometric and transdisciplinary methods. Empirical papers may cover topics such as estimation of established relationships between economic variables, testing of hypotheses derived from economic theory, policy evaluation, simulation, forecasting, econometric methods and measurement.
As a general interest journal, AREF emphasises the replicability of empirical results or transparency of method where papers are qualitative in orientation and may not be replicable. Replication studies of important results in the literature - both with positive or negative results - may be published as short papers in AREF. Authors are expected to make available their data set in case readers, editors or referees should want to replicate results reported in submitted contributions.