Unemployment and weak economic productivity are significant global issues, particularly in West Africa. Recently, through diverse mechanisms, remittances and foreign direct investment (FDI) have been sources of foreign capital flow that have positively influenced many less developed economies, including ECOWAS (ECOWAS stands for Economic Community of West African States). Nevertheless, these financial flows have exhibited significant inconsistencies, primarily resulting from economic downturns in migrants’ destination countries, with remarkable implications for beneficiary economies. This study, therefore, examines the effect of remittances and FDI on employment in ECOWAS. Specifically, the study assesses the effects of the inflow of remittances and FDI on employment using panel dynamic ordinary least squares (PDOLS) and also investigates the shock effects of remittances and FDI by employing Panel Vector Error Correction (PVECM), which involves variance decomposition. The results show that foreign direct investment (FDI) positively and significantly affects employment. Other variables that show a significant relationship with employment are wage rate, education expenditure, and interest rate. The variance decomposition result revealed that external shocks on remittances and FDI have short- and long-term effects on employment. The above findings imply that foreign direct investment has a far-reaching positive impact on the economy-wide management of the West African sub-region and thus calls for relevant policy options.

The purpose of this study is to examine the link between technical efficiency and both the corporate governance and financial performance of listed financial firms on the floor of the Nigerian Stock Exchange using three theoretical approaches: shareholder theory, stakeholders’ theory, and resource dependence theory. We employed a stochastic frontier analysis to examine the impact of technical efficiency on the link between corporate governance and financial performance on the one hand, and, on the other, multiple regressions comprised of OLS and Poisson estimates to analyze a data-generating set sourced from 2007 to 2020. The results of our OLS estimates suggest that a negative but significant relationship exists between the corporate governance mechanism and the financial performance of the listed firms. When we subject the analysis to the Poisson estimates, the relationship becomes positive and significant. Our results have some positive implications.

The credibility of financial reporting may be undermined when managers use accounting discretion to alter reported earnings, with possible consequences for investors’ confidence. This study investigates the individual and joint relationships between board and audit committee attributes and earnings management for 49 manufacturing companies listed on the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) from 2012 to 2024. Using an ex post facto panel design, the analysis relies on secondary information extracted from audited annual reports. Earnings management is proxied by the performance-matched discretionary-accrual measure developed by Kothari et al. (2005). Fixed- and random-effects models are estimated, and the Hausman specification test guides the preferred model. Results show negative associations between earnings management and board independence (β = -0.015), board financial expertise (β = -0.012), and board gender diversity (β = -0.009), all significant at p < 0.05, while board size is positively associated with earnings management (β = 0.005, p < 0.05). Taken together, the governance variables are statistically significant (R² = 0.624; F = 27.46; p < 0.001). The evidence highlights the importance of substantive board and audit committee monitoring within Nigeria’s corporate-governance framework (Nurjanah et al., 2025).