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Highlights The year 2020 was ushered in with a historical novel virus (COVID-19) pandemic in a manner that the world has never witnessed before. We employ the state of the art analysis to explicate the implications of the lockdown lifting in Nigeria using both analytical and descriptive statistics. Of the three episodes of COVID-19 in Nigeria, the easing up phases witness the highest cases of the virus with the addition of over 13,000 in just 41 days. Every day of the easing phase of the lockdown has witnessed an increasing number of cases.

The paper seeks to examine the impactful role of institutions in attracting remittances inflow to ECOWAS region for the period 1996–2013. In a bid to achieve this key objective, a system generalized method of moment (GMM) is adopted on a panel dataset in which insightful outcomes emanate. The results reveal an appreciable impact of institutional infrastructures on the migrants’ remittances in the region. More specifically, institutional measures of governance appear to act as a spur on remittances, but other institutional decompositions like economic and political governance structures constitute avoidable drags, judging by theoretical priors and statistical levels of significance. These results remain valid to the exclusion of the francophone countries from the original dataset. On the policy front, the overall target is for government to formulate policies that seek to address the symptomatic causes of low inflow of remittances into the region, with special focus on the institutional dimension of the governance framework. Among the auxiliary policy targets include those that would address the problems of dysfunctional institutions, as well as those that would deepen financial systems and engender improved growth of GDP per capita. The study also makes some suggestions for future enquiries.

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The study examines the extent to which lockdown measures impact on COVID-19 confirmed cases in Nigeria. Six indicators of lockdown entailing retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential, are considered. The empirical evidence is anchored on the negative binomial regression estimator, due to the count nature of the dataset on the daily cases of the virus. The study established the key following findings: First, retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, and workplaces are statistically significant and negatively signed as relevant predictors of the virus. Second, the impact of residential is positive and statistically significant at the conventional level. Lastly, the results are robust to an alternative estimator of Poisson Regression. The emanated policy message centres on the need to direct efforts toward ensuring total compliance to the lockdown rules as it holds the key to keeping the virus under check.