Analysis of prudential approaches to bank risk management: some econometric findings on African banks.

Summary This thesis contributes to the literature on prudential standards for bank risk management, the causality between financial development and economic growth, and the moral hazard hypotheses of bank capital regulation. The subprime crisis of 2007 has paradoxically served to highlight once again the shortcomings of the Basel I and Basel II prudential standards, due to its various consequences on global banking systems. By adopting an econometric approach and exploiting panel data on a sample of banks in sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb, we have used more specifically the Granger causality technique and the GMM estimation technique in order to carry out empirical studies on the causality between financial development and the real economy on the one hand, and on the other hand the relationship between capital and profitability (risk) of banks. The results underline the dependence between certain variables of bank profitability and economic growth on the one hand, and on the other hand, the behavior of African banks, in terms of capital ownership and excessive risk taking, fits perfectly with the moral hazard hypotheses and the capital regulation of the Basel Committee.