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The purpose of this study is to analyse the influence of exchange rate shocks on foreign trade (exports and imports) of fifteen economies within the ECOWAS sub-region. To accomplish the goal of this paper, Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) procedure was employed to investigate the impact volatility in the exchange rate market has on foreign trade in both long- and short-term with data between 1980 and 2020. To compute volatility, it relied on the GARCH (1, 1) model which predicted the conditional variances as proxy for volatility. Our empirical results are distinguished into export model and import model, and reveal that volatility in exchange rate influence foreign trade performance (exports and imports) negatively in the short-run, though statistically insignificant. The impact however becomes positive in the long run, and statistically significant for the two models. These results signpost that while the volatilities in foreign exchange market appear to deteriorate the international trade of these economies in the short-term, it substantially and significantly causes its improvement in the long-term. Hence, our results validate the J curve effect in the case of these ECOWAS economies. Policy implication from the findings suggests that to develop a robust international trade and ultimate economic growth, it is recommended that policymakers of these economies maintain a short-term stability in their foreign currency markets by way of adopting some intervention measures.

This study investigates the effects of global economic uncertainties on exchange rate management in Africa from 1990 to 2021. Employing the quantile regression technique, findings show that both global and domestic economic uncertainties have significant influence on exchange rate management in Africa. The intensity of global economic uncertainty rises during the bearish and transitional markets, but dependence declines during the bullish markets. Moreover, the relationship between domestic uncertainty and African exchange rate management shows that the structure of dependence improves around the upper tails but declines around the lower tails. African countries should pay attention to global economy in order to combat any impending negative effects of global economic uncertainties. Also, attention should be paid to other uncertainties such as political, social, or other factors that may aggravate domestic economic uncertainties.

This paper investigates whether stock markets respond to disease pandemic referencing the case of COVID-19 in Nigeria. The paper employs three cointegrating regression models: Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares, Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares, and Canonical Cointegrating Regression to analyse the effect of growth in total COVID-19 confirmed cases and related deaths in Nigeria and across the globe from 27 February 2020 to 4 September 2020 on the stock market performance. Key findings support the presence of long-run association between stock market returns and COVID-19 in Nigeria. The stock market is found to respond negatively to both domestic and global growths in total confirmed cases and deaths of COVID-19. Consequently, affected businesses in Nigeria should be assisted and bailed out by the government through practices such as tax filing, subsidies, targeted spending, and credit.

In recent times, there has been increase in climate change protest across the globe. However, whether decrease in emissions is connected with climate change protest or not is yet to be documented in the literature. Consequently, the aim of this study is to fill this gap by examining ex-post detection of how climate change protests and its interconnectedness with CO2 emissions. Using the Bai and Perron (1998) structural break test, we estimate the number of breaks as well as the date of such structural breaks in CO2 emissions series for 41 countries. Our aim is to match the date of the climate change protests to those of the structural breaks. We observe that climate change protests are fairly consistent with the dates of breaks in Europe and Asia, but not in BRICS economies or US, Canada and other countries. Therefore, this method allows us to solve a gap in the energy industry related to the modelling and correct allocation of positive shocks in CO2 emissions to climate change protests., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)