A viable economy's hallmark is its ability to generate positive growth rates and its capacity to sustain such growth, especially during a crisis. Economic crises have the potential to induce uncertainty, reverse pre‐crisis economic gains and force preexisting challenges to reemerge, necessitating actions on building economic resilience. Given the fragility of most countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA), the current paper evaluates the role of institutional quality (INSQ) and human capital development in boosting economic resilience in SSA. The sampled countries were classified into fragile and resilient countries. Annual data spanning 2000–2021 was obtained and analyzed using the Bias‐Corrected Method of Moments (BCMM) estimation method, which can adequately account for cross‐sectional dependence, endogeneity, and heterogeneity in the sample. The results revealed that human capital development improves the resilience of fragile and non‐fragile economies, and INSQ has a higher positive impact in fragile countries than in non‐fragile countries. The results of the bundled INSQ support the positive effect of economic governance, institutional governance, and political governance on the resilience of fragile and non‐fragile countries. Therefore, group‐specific economic resilient policies need to be designed to strengthen economic resilience in the SSA region, and buffers that will ensure a healthy response to economic crises need to be strengthened. In addition, sound institutions and massive investment in human capital development should be pursued to boost economic resilience in the SSA region.

Given the effects COVID-19 pandemic on the financial sectors across the world, this study examined the reaction of stock returns of 201 firms listed in the Nigerian Stock Exchange to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown policy. We deployed both Pooled OLS and Panel VAR as estimation methods. Generally, the results from POLS show the stock market returns of the Nigerian firms reacted negatively more to the global COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths than the domestic COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths and lockdown policy. The results of the impulse response functions revealed that the effects of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths and lockdown policy shocks on stock returns oscillate between negative and positive before the stock market returns converge to the equilibrium in the long run. The FEVD results showed that growth in the COVID-19 confirmed cases, deaths and lockdown policy shocks explained little variations in stock market returns. Given our finding, we advocate for the relaxation of policy of lockdown and the combine use of monetary and fiscal policies to mitigate the negative effect of COVID-19 pandemic on stock market returns in Nigeria.

This study adopted a novel quantile regression via moments to explore the effects of military spending on the distribution of economic growth of 14 MENA countries over the period from 1981 to 2019. The method, apart from enabling us to investigate the effects of military spending on the distribution of economic growth at different quantiles, also helps to address issues of heterogeneity and endogeneity characterising the panel studies. Our results showed that irrespective of measures of military spending and economic growth, an upsurge in military spending leads to a positive effect on economic growth at different quantiles, suggesting that military spending is productive and growth-enhancing in the MENA countries.

This study examines the relationship between globalisation and inclusive growth by considering the modulating role of institutional quality. To achieve our broad objective, we use data from 45 African economies over 1996–2018 to determine the panel cointegration and cointegrating regression association between inclusive growth, globalisation and institutional quality. To determine a suitable estimation technique for the empirical analysis, several pre-estimation tests were conducted. After confirming the existence of cointegration and slope heterogeneity, we adapted the long-run panel cointegrating methods—the fully modified ordinary least squares and dynamic ordinary least squares estimations. The results from both show that aggregate globalisation and its various dimensions have positive and significant effects on inclusive growth. Besides the direct positive impact on inclusive growth, globalisation has indirect positive and significant impact on inclusive growth through institutional quality. Finally, some policy implications are highlighted. JEL Codes: E02, F62, F63, O15, O43

This study examined the effect of financial development on unemployment in 19 emerging market countries, considering their age groups and gender dichotomy. The data covers the period from 1991–2019. Pooled Ordinary Least Square (OLS), Dynamic OLS, and quantile regression via moments were employed as the estimation methods. Robustness was tested with Fully Modified OLS and Canonical Cointegration Regression (CCR) estimation methods. Our results show that financial development has a conditional mean reducing effect on unemployment and a reducing effect on the distribution of unemployment. However, the reducing effect of financial development on the distribution of unemployment varies across the working-age population and youths. Thus, there is a need to formulate and implement a long-term financial policy to ensure economic growth and guarantee employment for the working-age population and the youths irrespective of gender.