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The widening gap in innovations among nations has received a lot of attention. In what follows, leading innovating economies have challenged themselves to do, but what remains of the laggards is still worth discussing. As a result, this study used articles from high-ranking journals in Scopus and Scimago; and used key terms to ascertain articles via Google Scholar. As found in this study, innovation is the key driver of recent developments seen by many countries and businesses. More specifically, it is observed in this review that innovation drives industrialization, increases productivity, and has a direct link with economic growth. Businesses are seeing growth in sales, sustained businesses, quick and quality service delivery, improved production processes and production volumes, and enhanced performance. In this review, Sub-saharan Africans (SSAs) were observed to have late assimilation of the innovation momentum and there is generally inadequate investment and policy dialogue on innovations in the region. Policymakers and researchers are to begin an extensive inquiry into the stands of SSA economies. SSAs must adopt a need assessment and adopt an appreciative inquiry approach toward investing in innovations and technology.

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The study sought to contribute to the extant literature on the interconnectedness between commodity spot prices and futures prices by covering daily data from 2001-2019. Employing the OLS and the QR, different dynamics of the relationship between commodity spot and futures prices emerged from the study. For oil and gold prices, OLS estimator revealed that neither spot nor futures prices of the commodities had a significant effect on the other. Quantile regression estimators however suggested otherwise. For oil prices, futures prices were found to have a significant positive effect on spot oil prices at the 60 th and 75 th percentile whereas spot oil prices were found to have a significant positive effect on the futures oil prices at the lower tail (0.1, 0.2, and 0.25 quantiles). For gold prices, futures gold prices had a significant positive effect on spot gold prices at the 75 th percentile (3 rd quantile) marked as the upper tail of the distribution whereas a significant negative effect was revealed at the middle quantile (50 th percentile). For cocoa prices, both the OLS and the QR estimators were significant in either direction. A significant positive effect of futures (spot) cocoa price on spot (futures) cocoa price was observed across all quantiles in both directions. The results suggest that speculators and arbitrageurs in the commodity market must be concerned about the causality moving from one direction to another and take appropriate investment positions that protect their interests.