Dozens of studies point to evidence of significant reductions in carbon emissions driven by climate agreements, such as the Paris climate agreement. However, these studies fail to answer a pertinent question, that is, are global carbon emission reductions due to reduced production activities or are production processes becoming more efficient as less carbon is emitted per unit output due to technical progress? Such an understanding is important to evaluate the tension between environmental quality and economic growth. 

This journal was first published on Science Direct by David Iheke Okorie and Presley K. Wesseh Jr

Read More

This study examines the effect of ICT on tax revenue mobilisation in 23 sub-Saharan African countries between 2000 and 2020. To address our objectives, it utilises a feasible generalised least squares approach that accounts for both heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation challenges. Particularly, six measures of ICT (import of ICT goods, export of ICT goods, ICT trade, internet penetration, mobile phone penetration, and aggregate ICT index) and six tax measures (total tax, direct tax, indirect tax, taxes on income, profit, and capital gains, taxes on goods and services, and taxes on international trade) are explored in the study.

This article was first published by the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) Journal of Economics and Sustainable Growth.

Read More

While several studies evaluate the impacts of the novel coronavirus pandemic on different markets, it is worth the while to also examine its contagion (fractal) effect on the top (based on their market capitalization) twenty cryptocurrency markets. These cryptocurrency markets’ information (return and volatility) were sampled for both the ex-ante and ex-post coronavirus outbreak periods for this event study analysis. The detrended cross-correlation approaches are employed for both the main and robustness analyses. The results are robust and confirm a significant fractal contagion effect of the pandemic on the cryptocurrency space through their return and volatility. The contagion effect is relatively stronger for the crypto markets’ volatilities compared to the returns, nonetheless. Hence, this study supports the contagious effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the cryptocurrency markets and its policy implications for investors in the crypto space.

Read More

With the global sustainable development goals, it has become imperative for developing countries, especially sub-Saharan African countries, to think inward on ways to increase domestically mobilized revenue. The recovery of the global economy within the last few years has increased foreign assistance inflow into African countries. However, the direction of its impact on domestic mobilized revenue is unclear. This study revisited the relationship between foreign aid and domestic mobilized revenues for 32 sub-Saharan African countries using a more recent and novel dataset on tax revenue.

Read More

This study examined the impact of exchange rate volatility on manufacturing output in the ECOWAS, using time series data spanning from 1970 to 2019. The study employed panel data analysis to examine the relationship between exchange rate volatility and manufacturing output among all the ECOWAS countries. GARCH was used to establish the existence of volatility; Dumitrescu & Hurlin Granger non-causality test for causality direction between manufacturing and exchange rate, while Panel fixed, and random effect model was used to assess the magnitude of the effects of exchange rate volatility on manufacturing output in ECOWAS. The result of the volatility test from GARCH confirmed the presence of volatility in Exchange rates across all the countries in ECOWAS. Furthermore, the random effect model results showed that exchange rate volatility has a positive and significant impact on manufacturing output in ECOWAS. Based on the findings of this study, it is therefore recommended that exchange rate policies such as floating exchange rates and exchange rate sterilized intervention that will pave the way for competitiveness should be formulated by monetary authorities in ECOWAS.

Read more