This paper investigates the impact of oil price shocks on stock returns in Nigeria using monthly data on four sectoral indices -Banking, Insurance, Food, Beverages, and Tobacco (FB&T) and Oil and Gas (O&G) -over the period January 2010 to December 2018. The oil price shocks are decomposed into precautionary demand, aggregate demand, and supply sources. The outcome of the estimation of a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model suggests that precautionary demand oil shock had negative and significant impact on the sectoral returns except for FB&T whose response was insignificant; aggregate demand oil shock had a negative but insignificant impact on the sectoral returns but for the O&G sector whose response was positive although insignificant; whereas oil supply shock had a positive but insignificant impact on the sectoral returns in the Nigerian stock market. However, O&G sector was the only exception with negative response to oil supply shock, albeit, insignificantly.

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In this study, we examined the effect of international migrant remittances on financial sector development with a panel of 6 countries in West Africa Monetary Zone (WAMZ). The novelty provided by our study is that we examined the effect of migrant remittances not only on the depth of the financial sectors but also on the efficiency and stability of the financial sector development which many studies failed to cover. We employed one-step differenced-Generalized Method Moments on a panel data of 6 countries and 21 observations (1996-2016) from each country. Our findings showed that international migrant remittances positively contribute to financial sector development in WAMZ. The result of robustness test indicates that the effect of remittances on the depth of the financial sector depends on the type of proxy variable used. We, therefore, recommended that effort should be made by the government to promote inflow of migrant remittances into the WAMZ sub-region.

This study examined the role of Africa’s regional integration in promoting industrialization in the continent. We traced the effort of various Regional Governments, Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and the African Union (AU) in promoting industrialization in Africa. Industrial development in Africa is still at the primordial level, making Africa depend mainly on primary commodities for export and leading to the reduction in the continent’s share of the global export of manufactured goods, increase in unemployment, and poverty. The study, proffers the argument that regional integration is a veritable instrument for achieving structural transformation and industrial development in Africa. We therefore recommended that the Regional Economic Communities should be reorganized in order to facilitate the ratification and implementation of the regional integration agenda which has direct consequence on sustainable industrialization in Africa.

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