The budget deficits of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have been widening over the years. This study investigated the impact of climate change on budget balance and projected its implication for fiscal policy in ECOWAS countries. The two-step dynamic GMM method was applied for a balanced panel data of 14 countries from 2008 to 2018. The study found that rainfall is the only climate variable that increases budget deficits. Other macroeconomic variables: debt to GDP ratio and inflation were also responsible for the widening budget deficits. A major policy implication of this finding is that extreme and unpredictable rainfalls will distort the fiscal balance of ECOWAS countries by either reducing the revenue generation outlets or by raising expenditures. This will lead to more borrowing that will further widen the existing budget deficits through debt servicing, hence, making the respective governments to pay less attention on other sectors of the economy. Thus, ECOWAS countries need to expand their revenue generation sources either by creating an enabling environment for more businesses and investments to strive or by engaging in more foreign direct investment (FDI).

Unemployment and job creation are central to the development agenda in Nigeria especially with the rising rate of youth unemployment resonating within the Country. Strategies and measures have been put in place to curb these appalling rates via a professionalized system of education that will equip individuals with skills and enable them to start up petty enterprises. However, unemployment in Nigeria is appallingly high despite these efforts. This study therefore investigated the nexus between entrepreneurship development and unemployment; and its implication for economic growth in Nigeria. The weighted least square technique was used to estimate the different models with time spans of five and nine years respectively within the period 1982 to 2013.The choice of this technique is driven by its ability to handle regression situations in the presence of non-constant variance (heteroskedasticity). The results established the occurrence of a twin effect: entrepreneurship development reduces future unemployment and also unemployment induces entrepreneurship development. However, the duration of impact is after eight years which is quite long. Finally, the projected rate of unemployment in Nigeria for the year 2018 as established by the study is approximately 29.6%.

Many studies in conformity with theoretical underpinnings have shown that insecurity exerts a negative effect on economic growth. This study investigated the effect of insecurity on economic growth in Nigeria. The vector autoregressive model was employed using quarterly data from 2009Q1 to 2016Q4. The major findings show that economic growth and investment activities tend to increase during periods of insecurity. Also the rate of unemployment reduced during periods of insecurity. This implies that insecurity only threatens economic activities with no negative effect on the entire economy as conjectured by various economic theories. Thus, to continuously sustain the Nigeria’s economic growth rate, the government needs to protect domestic and foreign investments by stepping up its national security.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries have expressed their desire to establish a monetary union by the year 2020 based on six macroeconomic convergence criteria. The desire is predicated on a series of strategies and various treaties ratified and signed by various ECOWAS Heads of governments and Central Banks’ Governors with more emphasis on the Maastricht-type set of convergence criteria that must be satisfied by all member countries before they ascend to the envisaged monetary union. Even though the convergence criteria may guarantee macroeconomic stability in a regional grouping, critics assert that the convergence criteria are insufficient and inconsequential to the formation of monetary union. The objective of this study is to ascertain whether ECOWAS countries have met all the macroeconomic convergence criteria making them fit for a monetary union. The analyses indicate that no ECOWAS country has met all the convergence criteria at a given point in time implying that the level of macroeconomic convergence in the region still remains inadequate relative to the set targets. However, WAEMU sub-set economies have met three of the criteria -public debts to GDP Ratio, deficits including grants, annual percentage inflation rate. The simple reason is that WAEMU is an existing monetary union with a common stabilization policy.

The study employs the Markovian processs on annual nominal effective exchange rate of CFA Franc spanning 1975 to 2017 to examine whether the CFA franc is prone to speculative attacks or a contagion effect. The findings reveal that the expected duration for the CFA Franc to be undervalued is twice higher than for it to be overvalued. This validates the contagion effect of a Euro crisis on the CFA Franc. Though the level of growth increased significantly during the undervaluation era, the level of uncertainty remains equally high. The findings confirm that exchange rate devaluation influences the expectations of private agents, which in turn triggers an attack on the domestic currency.