Purpose Given the ever-growing fiscal commitments of Nigeria and her chequered history of electricity generation and distribution, the fortunes of the energy sector in the country have been affected by the prevalence of energy poverty. Government policies such as public capital expenditure (PCE) present a crucial option for reducing energy poverty in Nigeria, providing the purpose of this study. Design/methodology/approach To investigate the relationship between government capital spending and five distinct energy poverty proxies, this research applies the Bayer–Hanck cointegration system and the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound test. Findings The findings indicate that public capital spending in Nigeria worsens energy poverty by reducing access to electricity, urban electrification, renewable energy consumption and renewable electricity generation, with a positive but insignificant influence on rural electrification. Originality/value This inquiry presents a pioneering investigation of the nexus between PCE and energy poverty in Nigeria. Also, aside from the variables of energy poverty adopted by existing studies, this study incorporates renewable energy consumption and renewable electricity output with implications for energy poverty and sustainable development.

PurposeThe growth of both the informal sector and illicit financial outflows necessitated this study, in order to investigate how countries in Africa respond to these realities in terms of mobilization of domestic resources. These are the main motivation for the current study to the extant literature in conjunction with the adoption of employing second-generation econometric techniques which take into account cross-sectional dependence and country-specific heterogeneity.Design/methodology/approachThis study therefore examined the capacity of Africa to mobilize domestic resources amidst rising illicit financial outflows and informal sector size in selected African countries between 2000 and 2018. Second-generation econometric techniques such as cross-sectional dependence tests, slope homogeneity tests, Westerlund (2007) long-run co-integration tests, Eberhardt and Teal (2010) augmented mean group estimations and Kónya (2006) panel causality testing were employed.FindingsFindings revealed the existence of cross-sectional dependence and slope homogeneity in the data series. Findings also supported the existence of depressing long-run impacts of IFOs and ISS on domestic savings. Causality test results were not uniform across variables among countries. Policy recommendations favour formalizing the largely informal African economies through budgetary policy adjustments and commitment to building stronger institutions.Practical implicationsThe fragility of the African countries economy and its macroeconomic indicators is suggestive for more policy construction.Originality/valueThis economic reality about the nature of the informal sector is one that has negated the traditional view which holds that economic reforms would make the informal sector shrink as it transits to formal sector. Experiences from Latin America and Africa in fact indicate that the informal sector is actually on an expansionary path in the wake of adjustment and policy reforms. It is often called the unobserved, unorganized or unprotected economy. With this sector growing in size, the possibility of a reverse may not be in sight, owing to the increasing poverty levels and unemployment prevalent in most African countries. Uncertain foreign investment and aid inflows coupled with lower export revenues and high levels of indebtedness have created new impetus to examine the capacity of Africa's fiscal policy regime to mobilise domestic resources for the development of the region. Surprisingly, the last decade witnessed continued rise in Africa's illicit financial outflows amidst large informal sector size (ISS).

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Although, economic crimes are not new phenomena in Nigeria, however, their size, sophistication and magnitude have changed in recent times. Theoretical literature on economic crimes and economic growth has generated a rich debate over the last few years producing scholars who theorized that economic crimes could be growth-enhancing and others who see it as growth-reducing. Where is Nigeria in this great debate? The failure to determine the nature of the relationship between economic crimes and economic growth in previous empirical works affected the choice of methodology employed by previous empirical works on Nigeria. This study is an attempt to offer a better methodology and proxy in the estimation of this relationship. Therefore, this study aims at providing robust econometric analysis, which deepens the understanding of the relationship between economic crimes and economic growth in Nigeria both in the short run and long run within the uninterrupted democratic dispensation period of 1999 to 2012 using OLS technique incarnated in a state-space time-varying methodology. Findings show a strong evidence of non-linear significant relationship between economic crimes and economic growth in Nigeria in the long-run with infinitesimal short run impact. The study also found a bi-directional causal relationship between economic crimes and economic growth in Nigeria and recommends, amongst others, a matrix of policies that address effective reduction of economic crimes, which includes heavy investment in infrastructure especially energy which nourishes industrial build-up that in turn creates employment as well as reduce the level of poverty.

Our objective in this study is to investigate if natural resource abundance can crowed-out the manufacturing sector in Nigeria. Under the framework of an ARDL and over a period of 1990-2019, findings of the results showed that in the short-run, natural resources positively impact on the manufacturing value added in the current period; however, after a one period lag, the contribution of natural resources to the manufacturing value added becomes negative. We also found that in the short-run, real interest rate, inflation rate and trade openness are negatively linked to the manufacturing value added, while employment in industry and gross fixed capital formation are positively related to the manufacturing value added. In the long-run, natural resources contributed positively to the manufacturing value added. The long-run results also show that the gross fixed capital formation and inflation rate negatively impact on the manufacturing valued added. The implication of our finding is that natural resources rent is closely linked to the success of the manufacturing sector and as such can also crowd-out the manufacturing sector. On grounds of these findings, we recommend, among others; that the proceeds from natural resources should be used to build critical infrastructure necessary to improve the performance of the manufacturing sector. This way, the economy can be diversified to create the needed employment.