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.

Entrepreneurship has been identified as a panacea to abating the rising unemployment rate in MENA. However, the region’s institutional quality could influence whether entrepreneurship would generate/stall employment. Thus, we examined the role of institutional quality in the entrepreneurship-unemployment nexus for seven MENA countries using the dynamic ordinary least square method to analyse data covering the period, 2006-2019. The results show that opportunity-driven entrepreneurship and total-early-stage entrepreneurship have the potential to reduce unemployment while institutional quality seems to augment the unemployment-reducing effect of entrepreneurship. This implies that promoting entrepreneurship and strengthening the institutional apparatuses in the MENA region should be prioritised.