According to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has one of the world's largest proven crude oil reserves with 302,809 million barrels (OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin 2018). Using average daily crude oil production for 2017 (see Fig. 1a), it would take over 390 years for Venezuela to run out of crude oil. This means that Venezuela will remain as a major crude oil producing country for a long time. Looking at the way Venezuela has managed its vast oil
This study examines the causal relationship between banking sector development and energy consumption in Nigeria over the period 1971-2013 incorporating crude oil price and indicators of economic performance. An autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach to cointegration provides evidence of long-run relationship among the variables. The long-run and short-run estimates suggest that a non-linear inverted U-shaped relationship exists between banking sector development and energy consumption in Nigeria, indicating that initially, energy consumption increases as the banking sector develops and then declines as the banking sector matures to generate efficiency in energy consumption. In addition, this study explores the direction of causality between the variables using the Toda-Yamamoto Granger causality test procedure. The results suggest that a unidirectional causality runs from crude oil price to banking sector development, from banking sector development to energy consumption and from energy consumption to economic growth. It may therefore be necessary for policy makers in Nigeria to incorporate banking sector development in the energy and sustainable economic policies.
The aim of this study is to estimate the impact of bribery on the wage performance of formal firms.
Setting:The empirical assessment uses a unique firm-level data set comprising 1141 Nigerian manufacturing firms, some of whom paid bribes to corrupt bureaucrats.
Methods:The study utilised a standard ordinary least-squares estimation technique. To address the potential endogeneity and measurement error bias arising from bribery, we used industry-location average bribe rate as instrument.Results: We find a significant negative effect of bribery on wages to the extent that a one percentage point increase in the rate of bribery reduces the level of wages paid to the workers by about 230 000 naira per worker per annum. A robustness check using the counterfactual evaluation framework of propensity score matching, supports the ordinary least-squares estimation.
Conclusion:This study lends support to the firm level-based hypothesis that bribery has a detrimental long-term effect on firm performance. In particular, that employers using their monopsony power shift the burden of bribery to the workers through compressing wages. In addition, our results justify the enormous attention of the international community in combating bribery and corruption in Nigeria and other developing countries.
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