This research tested the monetary approach to Balance of Payment in developing countries of West Africa in order to affirm whether the specified relationship in the approach depicts correctly the actual behaviour of the economies. Time series and cross-sectional data that ranges from 1970 – 2016 were used. The empirical results of the fixed effect model established a significant positive relationship between net domestic credit, interest rate and exports; an insignificant positive relationship between capital movements, imports, income and the dependent variable. Exchange rate, however, had a significant negative relationship with the net foreign assets, while inflation had an insignificant but negative relationship with net foreign assets. The pairwise causality tests indicated a unidirectional relationship between exchange rate, net domestic credit and net foreign assets while the other variables move independently and cannot granger cause net foreign assets. Hence, the study concludes that the Polak model is valid in the West Africa Monetary Zone despite the fact that they are no more operating a fixed exchange rate system. The study suggests that the attention of the monetary authorities and the governments should not only be on decreasing the money supply in the economy, since an increase in net domestic credits has a positive impact on the net foreign assets provided it is channeled towards domestic production.

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The major concern of regulatory authority overtime is on the need to enhance sound practices among banks through the improvement of corporate governance; therefore this research examined the effect of corporate governance on commercial banks profitability in Nigeria. The study covered the period of 2009 to 2018 and secondary data were obtained from the audited financial statement of the selected banks which are Guarantee Trust Bank Nigeria PLC, Zenith Bank PLC and First Bank of Nigeria PLC. Fixed effect regression technique was used to examine the effect of Audit Committee Size (ACS), Board Size (BS), Audit Committee Number of Meeting (ACNM) and Board Number of Meeting (BNM) on earnings per share (EPS) of the selected banks. The independent variables results showed a positive and significant relationship on Earnings per share of the banks with coefficient and probability(prob.) value of the variables as follows: audit committee size(0.6241;0.0109), board size(0.4349;0.007) and board number of meeting(0.0356) had positive and significant effect on earnings per share of the banks respectively. However, negative and significant relationship was established between audit committee number of meeting and earnings per share with a coefficient and probability value of -1.0781 and 0.0001 respectively. With the F-Stat. of 2.84 and a prob. of 0.025, all the null hypotheses were rejected and the alternative hypotheses accepted, indicating that all the independent variables significantly affect the dependent variable. The study concluded that corporate governance enhances commercial banks performance in Nigeria. It therefore recommended that attention should be paid to the audit committee size, board size and board number of meetings since an increase in them leads to increase in the earnings per share while the audit committee number of meetings should be reduced as it affects the earnings per share negatively. The regulatory authority should formulate strong policy frameworks that would ensure that commercial banks constantly comply with corporate governance standard set by the authority.

The health of a country’s banking system is a key determinant to the development of the country. A fragile banking system portends danger not only to the financial system but the entire economy. This study investigates the state of the Nigerian banking system in terms of stability or fragility from 1981 to 2020. We used the banking system fragility index (BSFI) proposed by Kibritçioğlu (2003) to analyze Nigerian banking industry aggregate data from three risk areas: credit, market and liquidity. We estimated that out of the 40 years examined, the banking system was fragile for 23 years given their BSFI less than 0 while it was not fragile for 17 years with BSFI = 0 or greater. We found that most of the years when the Nigerian banking system was fragile were periods of relaxed monetary policies, deregulation and credit expansion. Secondly, the years of banking system stability were when the county’s banking system was subjected to stiff regulation and consolidation. Given the number of years that the system was fragile, we observed that sustained economic growth and development requires that the banking system remain strong as long as possible, and that the Nigerian situation could not promote this important objective. We recommend that the financial regulatory authorities put in place more stringent policies as banks are more fragile during the deregulation of the banking industry.