Aid flows to developing countries is ultimately intended to help recipient countries attain sustainable development especially in the area of capital development, sustained economic growth, poverty reduction and reduced mortality rate. The justifications for increasing official aid to the poor countries of the world have constantly come under scrutiny and have generated intense debate among researchers. Against this background, this study is aimed at assessing the impact of official aid on poverty reduction in Nigeria from 1981 to 2014. The ARDL and the error correction model (ECM) were used to estimate for long-run and short-run dynamics respectively, while the Bound test was employed to test for long-run relationship between our variables of interest. Result of the Bound test showed that there exist a long-run relationship between official aid flows and poverty. Both long-run and short-run regression estimates revealed that official aid has non-significant positive impact on poverty reduction within the period. There is however strong sign of convergence toward long-run equilibrium as the speed of adjustment is significantly high. The results further showed that population growth exerted negative influence on poverty reduction both in the long and short-run whereas labour force participation was found to have relative positive impact on poverty reduction. We therefore conclude that while it is evident that official aid has positive influence on poverty reduction, the influence so established is not significant. We recommend that aid donors and international aid organizations should earmark aids for a specific needs and exhaust every prudential steps in making sure that such aid are used for the targeted aim with fact-based appraisals and implementation reports.

This study examines the effects of oil supply and global demand shocks on the volatility of commodity prices in the metal and agricultural commodity markets using the SVAR model.The empirical evidence is based on real time daily closing international commodity prices covering the period 2 December 2019 to 1 October 2020. The findings are presented in cumulative impulse responses and variance decompositions. The former is utilized to examine the accumulated influence of structural shocks on the volatility of agricultural and metal commodities whereas the latter reflect the share of variation in the volatility of each commodity arising from each structural shock. Various patterns are provided on how metal and agricultural commodity prices have been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy implications are discussed.

This study analysed financial literacy and access for women entrepreneurs in Nigeria. The study is qualitative in nature and adopted an interpretive research design which employed an in-depth interviews with mainly well-informed women entrepreneurs to evaluate their interpretations and perceptions of the influence of financial access and literacy on woman entrepreneurship in Enugu Metropolis, South-Eastern Nigeria. A purposeful sampling approach comprising twenty women entrepreneurs was employed for this research. The results indicates that financial literacy was a critical factor in the growth of women-owned business, this is found especially in the business start-up phase Furthermore, our analysis revealed that revealed that financial skill is critical to the growth and smooth operation of female-owned business.

The goal of this study is to assess the industry effects of monetary policy transmission channels in Nigeria within the period 1981-2014. Techniques of analysis employed in the study are the Johansen cointegration and the error correction model (ECM). Our regression estimates reveal that the private sector credit, interest rate, and exchange rate channels have negative effects on real output growth, both in the long run and in the short run. The results further show that, relatively, the degrees of the established effects are higher in the long run than in the short run. We employed the Johansen cointegration approach to determine the nature of relationship that exists between our dependent variable and the independent variables. The results show that, in the Nigerian case, monetary policy transmission channels jointly have a long-run relationship with real output growth of the industrial sector, and disequilibrium in the system is corrected at the speed of 72.2% annually.

This paper analysed the relation between the stock market indices and the developments in the international energy market using historical monthly data from January 1985 to December 2017. Energy prices as applied in the study are composed of changes in the prices of crude oil, natural gas (NGS) and liquefied NGS (LNGS). We employed the traditional vector autoregressive techniques in estimating the linkages between the variables of interest. Our findings showed that changes in energy prices did not have significant influence on the stock market. Although there was evidence of a long-run relationship between the two variables, no causal relationship was found to exist between them; this entails that past values of the prices of crude oil, NGS and LNGS were not vital in predicting the developments in the stock market. Likewise, lagged values of the stock market indices were not instrumental in forecasting the movements in energy prices. Thus, we conclude that the stock market could be more responsiveness to other macroeconomic indicators other than the energy prices.

The Covid-19 outbreak has led to extensive declines in international commodity prices. The outbreak as well as measures fashioned to contain it has been weighing down on global supply chains and commodity prices. The pandemic has been accompanied with unprecedented shock that has disrupted both the demand and supply of commodities. In view of the widespread global impact of Covid-19, this paper analyses the impact of the outbreak on global commodity prices with particular emphasis on the energy, agricultural and metals and materials sectors using international global prices and indices to trend the movements. In the wake of oil price war and dampened oil demand, the energy sector was the most hit with 15% average monthly decline in energy indices between December 2019 and April 2020. Oil recorded its largest one-month plunge on record in March. Movements in coal indices showed more resilience to the pandemic compared to crude oil and natural gas. Base metals were the most affected sector after energy with -3.49% average monthly changes in indices between December 2019 and April 2020. Of the major base metals and minerals, aluminum appears less affected by the outbreak compared to copper and zinc. In contrast, precious metals prices and indices remain stable and is the only commodity sector with positive monthly average change (1.99%) during the period. Gold prices maintained steady gains while silver and platinum prices followed a similar but weaker trend.The agricultural commodity indices largely maintained strong upward movement but plummeted at monthly average of 0.89% between December 2019 and April 2020. Grains and cereals proved more resilient to Covid-19 pandemic compared to timber, beverages, raw materials, and oils & meals.

This study examines the effects of oil supply and global demand shocks on the volatility of commodity prices in the metal and agricultural commodity markets using the SVAR model. The empirical evidence is based on real time daily closing international commodity prices covering the period 2 December 2019 to 1 October 2020. The findings are presented in cumulative impulse responses and variance decompositions. The former is utilized to examine the accumulated influence of structural shocks on the volatility of agricultural and metal commodities whereas the latter reflect the share of variation in the volatility of each commodity arising from each structural shock. Various patterns are provided on how metal and agricultural commodity prices have been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy implications are discussed.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the relative effectiveness of bilateral and multilateral concessional debts on economic growth in 32 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1985–2016. Design/methodology/approach The recently developed dynamic panel autoregressive distributed lag models which comprise three different estimators, the mean group, pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and dynamic fixed effect, were applied to estimate the model. Following these estimators, the Hausman test was employed to determine the efficient and consistent estimator. Findings The results showed that bilateral concessional debts had a negative impact on growth. From the findings, a 1 percent increase in bilateral concessional debts induced economic growth to decline by 38.1 percent points in the short run, and by 7.1 percent points in the long run; convergence to long-run equilibrium adjusted at the speed of 90 percent on an annual basis. Multilateral concessional debts were found to have a positive impact on growth both in the short and long run. The coefficient of the error term was negatively signed and indicates that deviations from the long-run equilibrium path were being corrected at the speed of 89.4 percent annually. Originality/value To the authors’ best knowledge, empirical studies that specifically seek to examine how bilateral and multilateral concessional debts impacted on growth are yet to attract the attention of researchers. As a result, this study will complement related extant growth studies, especially in the case of SSA.