Our study focused on only three countries, which are the biggest economies in Africa. This makes generalisation of the results to other countries difficult, especially the smaller ones. Therefore, we recommend that future research should expand our study to include more countries. Results from a bigger group of countries may also bring out challenges common to more countries, which may be approached at a regional level. This may provide another opportunity to enhance regional integration, which is also central to the attainment of the Africa Agenda 2063 and the SDGs.
Secondly, emerging theories are suggesting that what matters for economic growth is not only the structure or level of development of the financial sector, but how much less or more developed it is than what should be the optimal financial sector for each country. There is need for research that can investigate how deviation from the optimal financial structure (the financial structure gap) influences economic growth.
Thirdly, literature suggests that the role of financial markets evolve as the economies grow. Therefore the next study should endeavour to adopt a methodology that allows investigation of the evolving influence of financial institutions as the economy grows.
183 Lastly, our analysis did not split the pre- and post-reform analysis. Given that there is evidence to suggest that the influence of financial markets on economic growth is greatly influenced by reforms that have occurred in many African countries, we therefore recommend that future research should employ econometric techniques that allow for splitting the analysis between pre- and post-reform periods for each of the countries investigated.
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