This paper re‐examines the government revenue and expenditure relationship in South Africa using Enders and Siklos' Threshold adjustment and Granger causality tests. The paper allows for structural breaks in the unit root and cointegration tests. The results indicate the absence of any asymmetries in both the threshold autoregression and momentum threshold autoregression specifications of adjustments in the South African's budgeting process. The estimated symmetric error‐correction models provide support for the fiscal synchronization hypothesis of government revenues and expenditures for long‐run and short‐run dynamic equilibrium. These findings indicate that the South African fiscal authorities should try to maintain or even improve the control of their fiscal policy instruments to sustain the prudent budgetary process.

This study addresses the question of financial development and institutional quality influence on the environmental sustainability of some 13 countries from the sub-Saharan Africa. Relying upon pooled mean group (PMG) for panel data, we provide evidence which suggest that both financial development and institutional quality are statistically significant determinants of per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the region. More specifically, we found that without healthy institutions and sound financial system sub-Saharan African countries might not avoid environmental degradation experienced by advanced nations during their early stage of economic progress. Our results also support the EKC hypothesis in the region.  In addition, the paper also shows that more openness to FDI inflows is good for the environment across the SSA. These findings suggest the need for institutional and financial service reform that supports robust environmental conservation.

The study empirically examines the role of trade openness and other determinants in explaining the intensity of energy use in Nigeria using annual data from 1981 to 2015. The paper uses an auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model in interpreting both long-run energy intensity as a co integrating relation, and its short-run dynamics. The robustness of ARDL results is verified using Dynamic OLS (DOLS) estimation technique. The results provide evidence of a Cointegration relation between energy intensity and its determinants. The results provide evidence that trade only significantly reduces energy intensity in the short run. Meanwhile, the results also show that income growth and industry value added have significant reducing effects on energy intensity. The results also raise some important policy issues, particularly on the inflows of foreign aid.

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