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The primary objective was to evaluate the extent to which foreign exchange restraints import demand in Sierra Leone. Using time series data from 1980 to 2020, this study determined Sierra Leone's import demand function by including foreign exchange constraints in a structural model developed by Emran and Shilpi (2010). The model compensated for both short-run and long-run links by employing an ARDL bounds-testing technique with an error-correcting mechanism. The result showed that only the presence of a long-run relationship between domestic consumption and import demand was supported by empirical evidence. In the short run, domestic consumption, scarcity premium, and trade liberalization were found to be significant predictors of Sierra Leone's actual import demand. However, in the long run, only domestic consumption was found to be significant. Typically considered as the key determinants of import demand, real effective exchange rates and scarcity premiums were insignificant in both the short and long term. Therefore, the result indicates that Sierra Leone has no short-term foreign exchange constraints. This could be partially explained by the Bank of Sierra Leone's strategy over the years of providing foreign currency to the private sector to assist in the importation of essential goods. The key finding of the study is that Sierra Leone's import demand is not constrained by a shortage of foreign currency.

China remains a key international player in Africa, contributing much more than other countries to the trade and capital inflows to Africa. How these inflows have contributed to the prevailing poverty incidences and severity in Africa remain an empirical issue. The study investigated the short and long-run impact of Africa-China trade relations on poverty incidences using data from 1990 to 2017 for 20 African countries. To capture the linkage, the standard endogenous growth model was remodified to link poverty to trade between the selected African countries and China. The model was estimated using the dynamic and fully modified OLS techniques after establishing the time-series properties of the variables. The result of the analysis showed that the increased trade intensity between Africa and China has been beneficial to Africa and the evidence also confirmed that it is sustainable even in the long run. Export despite its meager size was a more significant contributor to poverty reduction than imports in the long run. It was also established that increased per capita income has greater significant impacts on poverty reduction in the long run. However, household final consumption expenditure was a major setback to poverty reduction in Africa both in the short and long run, Indeed, not only it aggravates poverty, it overwhelmed the alleviating potentials of both trade intensity and increase per capita income. The policy implication of the result is that better trade policy for increased exportation and increased domestic productivity in Africa are necessary for more improved efficiency of local production and increased per capita income over a long period

The paper examines the impact of bank consolidation on financial inter-mediation using data from the Nigerian bank industry from 2002 to 2010. Two models were specified and estimated: one for the lending activity and the other for the deposit activities. The model for lending activity has an interest rate on the loan as the dependent variable and deposit rate represents the dependent variable in the deposit model. The results showed that merger and acquisition, which was the main policy instrument for bank consolidation, has a significant effect on both lending and deposit activities of the banks in Nigeria. The result also shows that changes in the degree of average competition in bank markets proxied by the spread between interest rate among the banks is positive and significant in both the loan and deposit markets. This confirms the high level of price competition among the banks. The consolidation exercise had significant positive effects on both financial inter-mediation and especially on deposit mobilization. The study concluded though, the consolidation policy might have had other side effects, it has at least led to higher deposit mobilization, higher competition but however, it has led to higher cost of borrowing and spread between lending and deposit rates.

In recent times, significant attention has been focused on small and medium scale enterprises in developing countries because of their potential for diversification and expansion of industrial production, as well as job creation. But unfortunately, in spite of the plausible significance of these firms, the performance of SEs has been disheartening and the mortality rates of these enterprises still remain very high. In light of this, this study investigated the factors responsible for SE disheartening performance and high mortality (failure) rate using Shomolu LGA-one of the highly SEs concentrated clusters in Lagos state as the case study. Structured questionnaires were administered on 200 SEs that have been in existence for at least 5 years for the gathering of data. Following the analysis of data and discussion of findings, the major findings are that: the survival rate of SEs in Lagos is 42.2% and the average time to fail for SEs in Lagos state is about 10 years. However, the manufacturing SEs has the highest survival rate (53.8%) and the longest time to fail (18 years) followed by services with a 40% survival rate and 10 years as a time to fail while trade has a 43% survival rate but the lest time to survival. The finding shows that the major source of finance for SEs in Lagos state is owners’ savings while the high cost of production is the major problem of SEs in Lagos state. The study also found that inadequate finance is the major cause of SE death and low sales are the major initial sign businesses show before they collapse. It was also established that the top priority in the intervention and assistance, the SE sub sector required from government to strengthen their survival rate is increasing access to affordable credit facilities.

The paper examined the effects of capital inflow on economic growth and also investigated the role of trade openness in foreign capital inflow/growth nexus in Nigeria. This is with a view to testing modernization hypothesis in Nigeria. The paper adopted the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique to derive a unique index that captures the quantity and quality of the conventional measures of capital inflow along with trade openness. The method has been used in other studies but not yet applied to capital inflow versus growth analysis. The time series properties of the data were examined and Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound testing methodology was used to analyze the time series data. The result showed that capital inflow when interacted with trade openness had significant impact on growth, thus providing empirical support for the modernization hypothesis that capital inflow and trade policy are complementary and growth enhancing. The paper concluded that trade liberalization policies tend to enhance effectiveness of capital inflow and jointly promote higher economic growth in Nigeria.

This study examines long run and causal relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic development in Nigeria using annual data from 1970-2011. Both sub-national expenditures ratio and sub national revenue ratio were used to measure fiscal decentralisation in Nigeria. The result of the analysis showed that the federally allocated expenditures to sub-national has been greater than its corresponding allocated revenue in Nigeria and this has became pronounced from the year 1999 up till date under the administration of a dominant political party known as People Democratic Party (PDP) in Nigeria. Using VECM, the study found that fiscal decentralisation is cointegrated with economic development in Nigeria. That is, there is a long run relationship between fiscal decentralisation and economic development. The results from the VEC granger causality test showed a unidirectional causality run from economic development to fiscal decentralization i.e. economic development granger causes fiscal decentralization (only sub-national revenue decentralization ratio) in Nigeria. By implication, economic benefits derived from fiscal decentralization are the products of economic development simply because as economy is developing, these benefits emerge in Nigeria.

The paper examined the effects of capital inflow on economic growth and also investigated the role of trade openness in foreign capital inflow/growth nexus in Nigeria. This is with a view to testing modernization hypothesis in Nigeria. The paper adopted the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique to derive a unique index that captures the quantity and quality of the conventional measures of capital inflow along with trade openness. The method has been used in other studies but not yet applied to capital inflow versus growth analysis. The time series properties of the data were examined and Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound testing methodology was used to analyze the time series data. The result showed that capital inflow when interacted with trade openness had significant impact on growth, thus providing empirical support for the modernization hypothesis that capital inflow and trade policy are complementary and growth enhancing. The paper concluded that trade liberalization policies tend to enhance effectiveness of capital inflow and jointly promote higher economic growth in Nigeria.

This paper examines the effects of energy resources and carbon emissions on human welfare in selected African countries. The study specifies a neoclassical growth model augmented with energy inputs and crude oil carbon monoxide emissions. The results indicate that changes in crude oil consumption (COC), crude oil revenues (CORs), and oil price depreciation exchange rates have significantly and positively affected the development of human welfare and that carbon monoxide emissions have a significantly negative effect on human welfare development in Africa. These have also significantly deteriorated income inequalities in the continent. However, the net effects of oil exploration are significantly higher which have overwhelmed the negative effects of crude oil gas emissions, thus suggesting that effective use of revenue from oil resources and productivity could help in mitigating the negative effects of oil carbon emissions on human development and welfare in Africa. In addition, the results support the argument of the negative relationship between CO2 emissions and human welfare development as against the Environmental Kuznet’s Curve (EKC) hypothesis.

The main features of poverty are low levels of consumption and income, a fact‐of‐life in most African countries. This paper analyzes the fundamental trends of per capita income, government capital expenditure, the human development index, and the rate of unemployment in the Nigeria. A vector autoregressive model finds that: A reduced unemployment rate improves human development and consequently reduces poverty. As growth in public capital expenditure rises, unemployment falls and the human development index improves. Therefore, infrastructure‐based policies, which initially reduce unemployment, will also improve the living conditions of Nigerians in the end.

This study examined the causal relationships among financial development, foreign direct investment and economic growth in Nigeria over the period 1970 to 2009. The study utilized the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) for unit root test and the variables were found to be stationary, though not in their level form but in their first difference. The Johansen and Juselius (JJ) co-integration technique indicated the presence of co-integration among the variables. The tri-variate vector error correction model (VECM) test for the causal relationships showed the presence of causality among financial development, foreign investment and economic growth. The study concluded that financial development and foreign direct investment have a statistically significant causal influence on economic growth.

The global energy crisis and the renewed interest in international policies needed to find a suitable energy supply and consumption pattern has raised the tempo of research interest in the linkages between the energy sector and economic performance across countries. The empirical analyses and the adopted models for investigating these linkages highly depend on the development level and economic structure of the countries considered. The focus of this paper is to investigate the dynamic relationship between oil price, energy consumption and macroeconomic performance in Nigeria. The main motivation for the paper came from a study carried out on another country. Bekhet and Yusop (2009) investigated similar issues with data from Malaysia and found that there is an evidence for a stable long-run relationship between the oil price, employment, economic growth. Bekhet and Yusop (2009) also showed that changes in world oil prices also affect the total energy consumption in Malaysia but reverse does not hold in Malaysia context. In view of the fact that Nigeria is also a net export of oil and a developing country facing challenges with energy policy and economic growth, it is imperative to examine whether the result obtained in Malaysia could be replicated with data from Nigeria. This analysis is useful in assessing the dependence of energy consumption for Nigerian economy. This is important because when a country’s economy is heavily dependent on energy consumption, environmental policies for energy conservation could adversely affect economic growth. Therefore, the understanding of the direction of causality between energy consumption and economic growth could have important policy implications. Indeed, the relationship between use of energy and economic growth has been a subject of greater inquiry as energy is considered to be one of the important driving forces of economic growth in all economies (Pokharel, 2006). Besides that, this paper is also trying to look at the effects of world oil price to energy consumption as well as to the Nigeria economic performances namely the economic growth.

The study investigated the causal relationship between FDI, exchange rate and financial market development using quarterly data from Nigeria. This was with a view to determine whether there existed any significant causal nexus was from FDI exchange rate to financial market development or the other way round in Nigeria. The study adopted vector error correction mechanism. Exchange rate was included with a view to determining whether macroeconomic instability adversely affected financial market development in Nigeria. The results show that FDI had no significant causal effect on financial market development while there are bidirectional causality between financial market development and exchange rate. In addition, a further analysis of effects of FDI and exchange rate on financial market development showed that both FDI and exchange rate had negative effects on financial market development; thus implying that FDI and macroeconomic instability adversely affect the development and provision of financial services in Nigeria.