Given the relatively higher responsibility for the States for social and economic development, the resulting fiscal gap is financed, among others, by vertical resource transfer from the Centre to the States. However, the resource flow from the Centre decelerated from 15.2% in 1980s to 14.5% in 1990s following the fiscal reforms initiated by the Centre.
*  *  *  General Africa’s macroeconomic overview After a decade of strong performance in Africa’s economies, the global economic crisis has dented its growth path •  Economic growth in SSA has fallen from an average of 6.5% in the 2005–2007 period to 1.1% in 2009 (from a projected growth of 6.2%)  •  Exports have fallen from an average of 37.7% of GDP in 2005–2007 period to 31% in 2009 with reduced demand  •  The economic crisis has dampened the expectations on commodity futures markets thereby inducing falling prices and demand for most commodities  •  Falling export demand/declining commodity prices spread the impact of the crisis to far more SSA countries; suppressing economic activity and causing fiscal and external balances to deteriorate significantly  •  Africa’s oil exporters and middle income countries have been hard hit when compared to their low-income counterparts while the fall in copper and diamond prices has resulted in a significant drop of export receipts for Zambia and Botswana, respectively  •  Most of these countries had extensively built some fiscal space before the crisis – this has suffered severely  •  Current account balance has worsened with a significant drop in exports as compared to imports  Economic effects of the crisis on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) •  What emerged about 16 months ago as a global financial crisis turned into the sharpest global economic contraction in modern times.