This study examines the impact of public investment on private investment in South Africa using the autoregressive distributed-lag (ARDL) and nonlinear ARDL bounds testing approach for the period from 1980 to 2018. The ARDL results show that public investment crowds in private investment in the long and short run. The NARDL results indicate that the negative shock in public investment leads to a decrease in private investment in the long and short run. The results show that public investment has an asymmetric impact on private investment in South Africa. The study recommends that government increase investment in infrastructure such as energy, roads and railways, among others, in order to promote private investment.

This study examines the symmetric and asymmetric impact of public debt on economic growth in Côte d'Ivoire using time series data from 1972 to 2021. The analyses were performed using both linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models. The study also utilised the bounds F-test for cointegration, the Brock-Dechert-Scheinkman (BDS) nonlinearity test, and the Wald test for asymmetries. The findings of the bounds F-test provide support for both linear and nonlinear cointegration. The BDS test results indicate that the series are nonlinear, while Wald test results revealed an asymmetric relationship between public debt and economic growth in Côte d'Ivoire in the short run and symmetric relationship in the long run. Estimation results for the symmetric ARDL regression model provide no evidence of a statistically significant impact of public debt on economic growth, regardless of whether the analysis was conducted in the short run or long run. The NARDL findings indicate that, on average, positive changes to public debt lead to economic decline in the long run, while negative changes cause an economic upturn in the short run. The findings also show that GDP growth responds rapidly and strongly to negative changes in public debt. Therefore, the study encourages the government of Côte d'Ivoire to be cautious about public debt rise because it was established that they have a negative impact on economic growth. Negative changes in the public debt can serve to minimise the uncertainties in the business environment, thus promoting private, public, and foreign direct investments.

The study examined the crowding in or out effect of public investment on private investment in Botswana from 1980 to 2018 using the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach. The findings of the study indicate that infrastructure public investment negatively affects private investment while non-infrastructure public investment has a positive impact on private investment in the short run. The study concluded that infrastructure public investment crowd out private investment while non-infrastructure public investment crowds in private investment only in the short run. The recommendation emanating from the study is that the government should spend more on non-infrastructure public investment in order to crowd in private investment, especially in the short run, and introduce more initiatives to promote the role of the private sector in growing the economy.

The study examined the impact of trade openness on poverty rate in South Africa. The ARDL bounds testing approach was used with annual data covering the period from 1990 to 2021. The study estimated four models, that is, an income-based model and a consumption-based model using two measures of trade openness which are total trade and exports as a percentage of GDP. For the income-based model 1, the findings confirmed that trade openness has a long-run negative impact on the poverty rate, while it has no significant impact in the short run. For model 3, it was found to be insignificant in the long run while in the short run, it was found that exports lead to a decrease in poverty rates. The finding confirmed that for the consumption-based model 2, trade openness leads to a decrease in the poverty rate in the long and short run. For model 4, in which exports are used as a measure for trade openness, it was found that it leads to a decrease in household consumption in the long run. Based on the results the study recommends that governments in developing countries should engage with other countries to increase their export capacity and in turn reduce their respective poverty levels.

The international oil price has been increasing significantly, but consumers react more to the announcement of the increase in fuel (pump) price, than an increase in international oil prices. This study, therefore, investigates the direct effect of fuel prices on the inflation rate and wages in South Africa, on the one hand, and the domestic price pass-through from fuel prices to wages (indirect effect) on the other. The impulse-response function of the vector autoregressive (VAR) technique was used to examine the direct effects of fuel prices on the inflation rate and wages, as well as the indirect effect from fuel prices to wages in South Africa. Quarterly data from 2001Q1 to 2018Q2 were utilised. The empirical results showed that inflation and wages responded positively to the shock in the fuel price. The results indicated that although wages increased because of a shock in the inflation rate-depicting the pass-through from the fuel price-the direct impact of the fuel price on wages is more significant. This study departs from the usual studies that examine the exchange rate pass-through of international oil prices to the inflation rate. The conclusion drawn was that the pass-through effect was not as strong and did not contribute as much as the direct effect of the fuel price. Therefore, the indirect shock of fuel prices, via inflation, does not so much cause an increase in wages as its direct shock. The study concludes with policy recommendations.