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This paper investigates whether and how aid targeted at specific subcategories of economic infrastructure could assist the economies of 14 Economic Community of West African States to attract higher foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow via improvement in infrastructure in water supply and sanitation, energy, transport and ICT. By relying on the three stage least squares estimation technique that is able to account for endogeneity among structural equations, and utilizing data spanning 2005-2018, we found quite interesting results. First, aid targeted at infrastructure indicates a strong positive effect on the countries' infrastructure endowment. Second, there is robust evidence that aid promotes FDI, but not necessarily through the infrastructure channel. Targeted aid appears to exert a positive and direct knock-on effect on FDI-apparently, because investors anticipate the positive effect that targeted aid is almost always inclined to produce on host countries' infrastructure endowment. Finally, aid allocation by Development Assistance Committee donors seems to have been primarily merit-based, followed by weaker evidence for "need". The study recommends, inter alia, more need-based aid allocation, particularly in economies where initial infrastructure endowment is minimal.

This study estimated Nigeria's Keynesian and augmented money demand function using time series variables from 1986 through 2021. The Keynesian money demand function is estimated by considering income and interest rates as the determinants of the money demand function. In contrast, the augmented money demand function incorporates critical variables like exchange rate, income, and interest rates. With the Robust Ordinary Least Squares estimation method, the income level exerted a positive and significant effect on money demand, while interest rate put forth a negative but insignificant impact. The a priori signs of these two variables align with the Keynesian postulation that income directly correlates with the actual money demand function. At the same time, the rate of interest has an inverse relationship.Further findings from the augmented money demand function, as reported by the autoregressive distributed lag short-run estimates, indicate that the price level and exchange rate directly and significantly affect Nigeria's current money demand function. The money demand function so estimated was reported to be stable, given the cumulative sum of squares result. A general conclusion that can be drawn from the findings is that the money demand function is income elastic but inelastic regarding interest rate, price level, and exchange rate.

We ask the data whether and how aid targeted at specific sub-categories of economic infrastructure could assist ECOWAS economies to attract higher Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflow via improvement in infrastructure in Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS), energy, transport, and ICT. By relying on the 3SLS estimation technique that is able to explicitly account for dependencies between 3 structural equations on the allocation of targeted aid, the determinants of infrastructure, and the determinants of FDI – we found quite interesting results. First, aid targeted at infrastructure indicates strong positive effect on the countries’ infrastructure endowment, as expected. Second, there is robust evidence that aid promotes FDI but, surprisingly, not necessarily through the infrastructure channel. Targeted aid appears to exert a positive and direct knock-on effect on FDI - apparently, because investors anticipate the positive effect that targeted aid is almost always inclined to produce on host countries’ infrastructure endowment. Finally, aid allocation by Development Assistance Committee donors seems to have primarily been merit-based, followed by weaker evidence for ‘need’. Therefore, we recommend more need-based aid allocation particularly in economies where initial infrastructure endowment is minimal. There is also need for extended effort at index construction (e.g., index of infrastructure need) and data collection to drive country-case studies. This should identify the transmission channel from aid to FDI and how the associated binding constraints could be overcome.

This study utilized data from the first quarter of 2010 to the fourth quarter of 2021 to explore how volatility in the capital market can influence the real sector of the Nigerian economy. With the use of the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) approach, we realized that there is no volatility clustering in the Nigerian market capitalization given that the estimate of lagged value of residual is negative and significant. Also, the decay of the response function on a quarterly basis being 0.3054 is quite low and is symptomatic of response functions to shock dying at a faster pace. Therefore, a new shock in the Nigerian capital market it will have impact on the market capitalization for a short period making the market less predictable. This makes the Nigerian capital market to be efficient since the market is not easily predictable. The VAR result revealed that the market capitalization put forth a positive and significant influence on economic growth; with the impulse response function indicating that economic growth responded positively to shocks in market capitalization. The paper concludes that the capital market needs be streamlined in order to avoid volatility clustering in the future, in order to maintain the efficiency of the market.