The study examines the effect of health expenditure on health outcomes in sub-Sahara African (SSA) countries.These countries have made significant efforts in increasing health expenditure over the years, with the aim of improving health outcomes. Despite this, health outcomes have only responded marginally, raising concerns on the significance of health expenditure in improving health outcomes. The data for the study were sourced from the 2014 World Bank's World Development Indicators for a sample of 40 SSA countries. The study was based on the Grossman Human Capital Model on the demand for health and the fixed effect was used in the empirical analysis. The findings indicate that health expenditure has a significant but inelastic effect on health outcomes in SSA, reducing mortality rates and improving life expectancy at birth. Reductions in mortality rates were significantly influenced by public health expenditure, whereas improvements in life expectancy at birth were significantly influenced by private health expenditure. There is, however, a strong complementary relationship between public and private health expenditures in SSA, despite the dominance of the former over the latter. Given the significant but inelastic effect of health expenditure on health outcomes, the study recommends that SSA countries should make efforts to increase health expenditure in order to improve health outcomes. In particular, there should be deliberate efforts to increase public health expenditure with a view to reducing the burden of private health spending on individuals. This perhaps can be achieved through effective health insurance schemes, which will enable people to save against financial crisis that may arise due to ill health, thereby reducing out-of-pocket health expenditure.Ã Eric Arthur (corresponding author),

This study examined the joint effect of carbon emission and health investment on economic development in Nigeria by integrating ecological economics approach with the endogenous growth model. Through the adoption of annual time series spanning 1980-2017, the bounds testing approach of the autoregressive distributed lag framework established the existence of co-integration among the variables in the model. The long run estimates revealed that a 1% increase in government health investments enhances economic development (proxied by GDP per capita) by 0.008% while a 1% increase in the level of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) reduces GDP per capita by 0.1%. Furthermore, evidence shows that no causal link exists between fossil fuel consumption (FFC) and CO 2 contrary to previous studies. However, unidirectional causality from health outcomes (proxied by life expectancy) to CO 2 , as well as from CO 2 to electricity consumption (ELCON) is observed. Also, increased energy consumption (FFC and ELCON) directly influences GDP per capita.The study recommends that efforts to reduce CO 2 should target firms manufacturing cement, asbestos and other dust-generating products as alternative contributors to CO 2 accumulation. Equally, mitigating the health effect of CO 2 will require effective, efficient and adequate public health investment.

This study interrogates the effects of electricity consumption and government agricultural spending on agricultural output (AGOP) in Nigeria using data that spanning through from 1981 to 2017. The unit root test was conducted with Phillip Perron at constant and trend while the dynamic model of autoregressive distributed lags was used in ascertaining the existence of cointegration among the variables in the model. The outcome of the study shows that poor electricity supply has significantly retarded the level of AGOP in Nigeria while public agricultural spending indicates a weak positive lag effect on agricultural sector performance. These outcomes capture the adverse effect of shortage in electric energy supply and poor government allocation on agricultural production of goods and services. We, therefore, advocate for sector-driven energy policies that will foster the growth and development of the agricultural sector through mechanisation of agricultural system.

The article empirically examines the response of stock prices in the Nigerian Stock Market to interest rate risk, using the Duration and Convexity model. A simple non-linear stock price model that incorporates measure of interest rate duration and convexity and a vector containing a battery of other control variables is specified and estimated using annual secondary data that covered the 1981-2006 sample period. The empirical results largely corroborate the hypothesis of interest rate sensitivity of stock prices in the Nigerian Stock Market. Specifically, we find both measures of interest rate duration and convexity to exert strong but opposite effects on stock prices in Nigeria. The empirical evidence shows that the net effect of interest rate changes on stock prices is negative, an indication that stock prices fall with increases in stock risk. The results provide empirical support for the duration and convexity hypothesis of the existence of a non-linear relationship between interest rate risk and stock prices in Nigeria.