PurposeMany West African countries face the challenge of growth inclusiveness. The region is also facing challenges of equipping its teeming population with high-quality skills despite many reforms and initiatives introduced in the past. This study, thus, identifies education as a crucial contributory factor to growth inclusiveness in the region. It, therefore, examined the role of education in growth inclusiveness in West Africa between 1990 and 2017.Design/methodology/approachThe study utilised different proxies to capture quantity and quality dimensions of education. The unit root and ARDL “Bounds” tests were employed at a preliminary stage. Based on the preliminary tests, the study explored autoregressive distributed lags modelling technique to capture the short-run and long-run dynamic effects.FindingsThe empirical results reveal a positive impact of school enrolment measures in most of the countries in both short-run and long-run. Education quality measure exerts positive impact and significant in few countries under consideration.Practical implicationsThese countries should give adequate attention to quality when designing education policy to foster their inclusive growth.Originality/valueThis study highlights the critical role of education in the inclusive growth pursuit. Education quantity is important to growth inclusiveness but the quality of education is more fundamental. The quality of education possessed determine to a large extent, what individual can contribute to the productive activities within the economy and accessibility to benefits from economic prosperity.

In response to changing prices, incomes and demographics, household use of various fuels such as electricity, gas, kerosene and fuel wood have changed over the years. In this paper we estimate income and price elasticities of household demand for various types of energy in urban southwest Nigeria. Household micro‐data was collected via the administration of a questionnaire. Empirical analysis showed that all energy goods are inelastic for own price elasticities and cross price elasticities. Most of the cross price effects are negative values indicating complementarity between energy goods. This suggests that substitution possibilities between energy goods are quite limited. However, kerosene is shown to be the main fuel used for cooking by about 90 per cent of households; the use of LPG and electricity is minimal. The income group analysis further shows that kerosene is preferred across all income groups. Budget share allocations reveal that households allocate a greater share of their income (40 per cent) to kerosene consumption while LPG gets the lowest share allocation of (3 per cent).

Purpose This paper aims to examine the impact of health and other exogenous shocks on stock markets in Africa. Particularly, the authors examined the resilience of the major stock markets in 12 African economies during the recent global pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses the recent panel vector autoregressive model, which enables us to capture the response of stock markets to shocks in COVID-19, commodity markets and exchange rate. For robustness, the authors also analysed the panel Granger causality test. Data was obtained for the period ranging from 2 January 2020 to 31 December 2020. Findings The results show that the growth in COVID-19 cases and deaths do not have any substantial impact on the stock market returns of these economies. In terms of commodity markets, the authors find that gold price has a negative contemporaneous effect on stock returns, but the effect fizzles out around the fifth day while crude oil price, on the other hand, has a significant positive simult aneous impact on stock returns and also converges around the fifth day. The authors further find that the exchange rate has a contemporaneous and nonlinear effect on stock returns and seems to be more dramatic when compared with the other variables. Overall, the results show that stock markets in Africa appear to be flexible and resilient against the COVID-19 outbreak but are affected by other exogenous shocks such as volatile commodity prices and the foreign exchange market. The effect is, however, short-lived – between one to five days. Practical implications Following the study’s findings, policies should be put in place to support financial markets by way of hedging against commodity instability and securing domestic currency financing. Policymakers are also recommended to concentrate on managing the uncertainties around their exchange rate markets and develop robust and efficient domestic financial markets to encourage local and foreign investors. Originality/value Several studies have been carried out on the effects of disasters (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) on stock markets, but only a few studies have examined the resilience of stock markets to health and other exogenous shocks. This study’s attempt is not only to examine the impact of COVID-19 health shocks on stock markets but also to analyse the resilience of the sampled stock markets. The authors also analyse the resilience of stock markets to commodity markets and exchange rates shocks.

Air pollution is projected to be higher in low-income countries most of which are in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) than other parts of the world; yet not many studies provide evidence relating air pollution with health condition in the region. This paper contributes to empirical literature evidence in this regard by examining the effect of air pollution measured using Carbon dioxide emission (CO2) on life expectancy and infant mortality rates in the SSA region. The Fixed and Random effects model were fitted to a panel of 44 countries from the period 1960 to 2017. The results suggest that poor air quality contributes to existing low health status in SSA inducing a fall in life expectancy and rise in infant mortality rates. The evidence showed that a 1% increase in CO2 emission leads to a fall in life expectancy at birth by approximately 1.5 years and increase in infant death by about 0.1 %. Findings indicate that existing poor health outcome in SSA are connected to poor air quality. In the bid to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on health, there is need for governments in the region to focus on reducing air pollution, particularly in achieving significant fall in infant deaths and improvements in life span.

Since a larger percentage of government revenue are generated from crude oil trade, the fluctuations in the price of oil have always been influencing the budget financing in Nigeria. Also, investment decisions and trade cost are been influenced by the status of the oil price. The study investigates the relationship between oil price, trade openness, current account balances and official exchange rate in Nigeria using secondary data from 1980 through 2016. The non‐linear auto‐regressive distributed lag (NARDL) was used to analyse the short‐run and long‐run link between the variables. From the findings, it was established that in the short run and long run, trade openness negatively impacts on the official exchange rate of naira to dollar in Nigeria. The consumer price index positively and significantly influences exchange rate value in Nigeria in the short run and long run. Positive changes in oil price impacted negatively on official exchange rate in the short run, but in the long run had a positive impact. Negative changes in the price of oil have a positive insignificant and negative significant impact on official exchange rate in the short run and long run, respectively. The error correction result verified that the variables (trade openness, current account, oil price and consumer price index) correct 91 per cent deviations of exchange rate from short‐run equilibrium back to equilibrium in the long run. The study concludes that trade policy in Nigeria is not in favourable direction of official exchange rate in Nigeria. Also, positive changes in oil price and current account balances are strong determinants of the Nigerian official exchange rate of naira to dollar in the long run. Therefore, it is recommended that trade policies should be reviewed in Nigeria towards enhancing other sectors that would add more value to naira.

Inclusive growth, pro-poor growth and broad-based growth are all terms used to explain growth processes that enables the entire population including the poor to actively participate and benefit from the growth process. In the last two decades Nigeria’s GDP has averaged at about 7%, indicating a fast-growing economy. Despite having a high GDP growth rate, it has not translated to improved standard of living for majority of the people, rather the level of poverty is on the increase. Income inequality has also widened in the country. This clearly shows that increase in GDP alone is not a sufficient condition for reduction in poverty and inequality. In order to avoid the problem of unwanted labour reserves with high growth rate, it is important to make growth inclusive. This study utilised the opportunity index to analyse the growth and equity dimension of inclusive growth across the entire population distribution. Cross sectional data obtained from the General Household Survey (GHS) 2015, by the National Bureau of Statistics was used. This study revealed that inclusive growth was not achieved in the area of employment, provisions of health care in the private and rural health institutions, secondary and tertiary education.