This study provides an analysis of chaotic information transmission from the COVID-19 pandemic to global equity markets in a novel denoised frequency domain entropy framework. The current length of the pandemic data offers the opportunity to examine its role in the asymmetric behaviour patterns of investors according to time horizons and the diversification potentials available to them. We employ the total daily global confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 27 equity indices from December 31, 2019, to April 18, 2021. Our results corroborate the idea that diversification potentials are stronger in the short to medium term. The Global Index (higher risk) and Canada and New Zealand (lower risk) remain at both ends to pair some other equities to offer diversification prospects because of the transmission of information from COVID-19 to the selected equity markets. In addition, we provide the source of these diversification prospects as information flow rather than transmission of shocks, which is common in the literature. Furthermore, our results suggest detailed levels of risk (lower vis-à-vis higher) in the situation where they have been stripped of the noise in the market. The findings allow both investors and policymakers to make informed decisions based on the time horizons since the pandemic communicates different chaotic information with the lapse of time. This is imperative to avoid the negative consequences of the increasing infection rate on global stock markets.

This paper employed wavelet coherence and partial wavelet coherence to investigate the time-frequency effect of global economic policy uncertainty on the comovement of five agricultural commodities such as maize, oat, rice, soybean, and wheat using monthly data from January 1997 to December 2019. In general, we observed heterogeneity in comovement structures of the agricultural commodities market at different time-frequency scales which are profound at high frequencies from the bivariate wavelet coherence. The partial wavelet coherence analysis shows that global economic policy uncertainty is a driver of agricultural commodity market connectedness. This implies that extreme changes in economic policy uncertainty have the tendency to influence commodity price comovement. This poses risk to the stability of the agricultural commodities market, which requires the policymaker’s intervention to protect against the spillover risk contagion effect in uncertain times.

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The desire to form monetary unions among regional blocs in Africa has necessitated the need to assess the degree of financial systems interdependencies in Africa economic blocs for their suitability to have harmonised economic policies of eventual monetary unions. In this regard, SADC has pursued policies to harmonise and integrate its financial system as a precursor to its intended monetary union. However, the ensuing risk among exchange rates of economies in SADC is presumed to rise during severe uncertainties. This study examines the degree of asymmetry and nonlinear directional causality between exchange rates in SADC in the frequency domain. We employ both the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and the Rényi effective transfer entropy techniques to investigate the multiscale information that might be disregarded and further quantify the directional flow of information. Analysis of the study is presented for four frequency-domains: high-, medium-, and low frequencies, representing short-, medium-, and long-terms, respectively, in addition to the residue (fundamental feature). We find a mixture of asymmetric and nonlinear bidirectional and unidirectional causality between exchange rates in SADC for the sampled period. The study reveals a significant positive information flow in the high frequency, but negative flow in the medium and low frequencies. In addition, we gauge a bidirectional significant negative information flow within all the 15 economies for the residue. This suggests a higher risk of uncertainties in exchange rates of SADC. Our findings for low probability events at multiscales have implications for the direction of the future of the SADC monetary union. This calls for further sustained policy harmonisation in the region.

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