Studies have documented the strong effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on different world economies. In this study, we examine the influence of COVID-19 cases in India on the country’s sectoral stock indices. Our results find that COVID-19 has had a negligible influence on the returns of these stocks; however, it causes them to fluctuate significantly. We provide insights for the government and local and international investors.

The misconception of services as being non-productive has led to the neglect of the service sector in both economic theory and applied economic researches. The Nigerian economy highly depends on the oil sector to generate revenue for the entire economy. This study examines the response of economic growth to the dynamics of the service sector in Nigeria from the windows of governance indicators. Using annual data series, endogenous growth model, and autoregressive distributed lag technique, transportation and communication service subsector is significant and positively related to economic growth. Health service subsector and transportation and communication subservice sector are significant and positively related to economic growth when governance indicators were accounted for. Interaction of the subservice sectors with governance indicators shows that none of the service subsectors were significant but were positively related to economic growth. The study shows that the activities of the education subsector have not contributed significantly to economic growth. Thus, for education to contribute positively to economic growth there is a need for increase in budgetary allocation to education subsector. Efforts made to control corruption and promote government effectiveness should be reviewed frequently to checkmate the processes of governance, so that bureaucratic processes would not hinder services from contributing significantly to economic growth.

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In this paper, we model the relationship between fiscal deficit and inflation for Nigeria using annual data from 1980 to 2016. We employ the linear ARDL approach and account for structural breaks using the Bai and Perron (2003) test that allows for multiple structural changes in regression models. The paper finds that the fiscal deficit is a major determinant of inflation along with other macroeconomic factors considered in the study. However, we observe that it may be necessary to pretest for structural breaks when modelling the relationship between the fiscal deficit and the price level, as it performs better than when structural events are not considered. The results imply that a fiscal management process that does not encourage increased revenue and reduce fiscal deficits will further worsen the level of inflation in the country.

With the advent of the global COVID-19 pandemic, various world economies have been adversely affected. Occurrences such as plummeting equities, crippling global economic activities and surge in market volatility amongst others have become prevalent across the world. Assessing the economic impact of this crisis becomes expedient from a policy standpoint as the crisis unfolds with extreme speed. To this end, we employ the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to examine possible relationship between the pandemic and stock prices for global and some selected countries, namely China, France, Italy and the United States. We find evidence that the effect of COVID-19 observed cases on stock prices is rather varying across countries and limited, the spillover effects orchestrated through the recent oil and financial market volatility cannot be overlooked. Given the speed of occurrences, there is need for governments all over the world to be more proactive in striving for a breakthrough over the virus otherwise, in the coming weeks the global economy may receive a surge of the pandemic.