This paper examines the interaction between health expenditure and health outcomes with due consideration for government effectiveness across developing African economies. The rich data for this study draw from forty-five Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries covering the period 1960 to 2022. The analysis follows a country-specific comparative manner using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model as the major estimation technique. The results indicate that poor health outcomes are not due to inadequate budgetary allocations alone. Specifically, this study found a cointegrating relationship and strong adjustment of health outcomes deriving from the shocks and dynamics of not just health expenditures, but also government effectiveness. It is therefore recommended that strong institutions and safety nets be created to guard against corruption and leakages that derail the beneficial impact of public health spending. Also, government expenditures should be focused more on cottage and primary health dimensions to better mitigate adverse health conditions in SSA countries.

This study investigated in cross-country and panel form the interactions of bank development, stock market development and global equity index, focusing on the BRICS countries covering the period 1990 to 2018. We found a bidirectional causation between bank development (CPSGDP) and stock market performance as proxied by the depth of the markets (MCAPGDP) in the BRICS countries. Cointegration was also found using the panel cointegration framework and the bounds test for the ARDL estimators. This largely proves that a long-run relationship of both direct and reverse nature exists between bank development and stock market performance. For the bank development and market performance models respectively, all the error-correction terms were found to be negatively significant, indicating that they both share dynamic profile and adjust appreciably to deviations from equilibrium between the short run and the long run. The global equity index showed that stock market development interacts more with the global financial environment than bank development in the BRICS countries. Our findings support the complementarity and coevolution hypothesis in the stock market and bank development nexus.

Since the introduction of asymmetric cointegration and error-correction modeling, old theories have been getting a renewed attention, and purchasing power parity theory (PPP) is no exception. In this paper, we revisit the PPP by applying this relatively new technique. When we applied the symmetric cointegration test of Pesaran et al. [Pesaran, MH, Y Shin and RJ Smith (2001). Bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 16(3), 289–326], we found cointegration between the nominal exchange rate and relative prices in 22 out of 82 countries. However, application of the asymmetric cointegration method of Shin et al. [Shin, Y, B Yu and M Greenwood-Nimmo (2014). Modelling asymmetric cointegration and dynamic multipliers in a nonlinear ARDL framework. In R. Sickels and W. Horrace (eds.), Festschrift in Honor of Peter Schmidt: Econometric Methods and Applications, pp. 281–314. New York: Springer] increased the number to 51 out of 82 countries. Nonlinear adjustment of relative prices was said to be the main contributing factor.

A country is said to live within its international budget constraint if its exports and imports are cointegrated. Previous studies that tried to verify the cointegration between exports and imports used linear models and supported the theory in almost 50% of countries. In this paper, when we use the nonlinear ARDL approach and asymmetry cointegration method, we support the long-run link between imports and exports in 94 out of 100 countries in our sample. This study is not only the most comprehensive study in the literature, but it is also the first to show that, indeed, trade flows adjust in a nonlinear fashion.