Despite the magnitude of remittances as an alternative source of investment financing in Africa, the financial sector in Africa has significantly remained underdeveloped and unstable. Finding a solution to Africa's financial deregulation problems has proved tenacious partly because of inadequate literature that explain the nature of Africa capital and financial markets which has shown to be unorganised, spatially fragmented, highly segmented and invariably externally dependent. We examine the structural linkages between remittances and financial sector development in Africa. Panel data on indices of remittances was regressed on indices of financial sector development in fifty-three (53) African countries from 1986 through 2017 using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimation procedure. We accounted for cross-sectional dependence inherent in ordinary panel estimation and found a basis for the strict orthogonal relationship among the variables. Findings revealed a positive long-run relationship between remittances and financial development with a significant (positive) short-run relationship. It is suggested that, while attracting migrants' transfers which can have significant short-run poverty-alleviating advantages, in the long run, it might be more beneficial for African governments to foster financial sector development using alternative financial development strategies.

The re-basing of the Nigerian economic data since 2013 has shown the growing relevance of the service sector to the economic development of Nigeria. The need to investigate the nexus between the service sector and macroeconomic variables become imperative in view of inadequate research attention in the past and the present desirable concern for policy shifts in favor of promoting activities in the sector. It is in this context that our paper considered the effects of exchange rate behavior on the performance of the service industry in Nigeria. More so that it is becoming increasingly clear that the openness of the Nigerian economy to the outside world and the seeming dollarization of earnings from economic activities, even with high local content, have varied impacts on economic behavior in many sectors of the economy. A comprehensive study was carried out to determine the relationship between the dynamics of exchange rate and the service industry activities. The data used include services, exchange rates, money supply, domestic credit, interest rate and inflation covering the period of 1981- 2015. Using the ARDL, a 10% point increase in exchange rate volatility and domestic credit increases service output growth (SER) by 0.68% and 5.15% respectively. The paper thus suggest that there must be reforms in government polices to remove barriers to entry by private investors into certain services in order to prevent market distortions and reduce cost of capital so as to enhance an integrated services-manufacturing industrial growth.

This study adopts the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and the variance decomposition techniques in testing the financial acceleration theory in banks intermediation. The bank intermediation variable is categorized into variable deposit mobilization, loan administration, delegated monitoring and risk diversification. Using cointegration analysis and quarterly secondary data between 2009 and 2016, this study assessed the short and long run influence of the categorized bank activities on their stock prices. The results indicate that banks intermediation exact influence on both the short and long run stock prices of DMBs in Nigeria as the ECM (-0.1420) result showed a significant speed of adjustment towards equilibrium while the overall model fitness showed that there is a long run causality running from banks intermediation measures and stock prices. Similarly, the result of the variance decomposition of stock prices shocks indicate that over time a significantly increasing proportion of stock prices is explained by loans and capital (delegated monitoring).

Despite a large and growing list of studies on COVID-19 across space and time and on heterogeneous social, environmental and welfare issues, the empirical relations on the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic and Africa’s market capitalization objectives remain dimly discerned. Even more worrisome is Africa, where the condition for growth and development has not been adequately fulfilled. This structural ambiguity calls for a policy document that is evidence-based to reach conclusions to aid the containment, risk analysis, structures and features of the deadly and fast-spreading disease. This study employed negative binomial and the Poisson regression to establish the contemporaneous influence of COVID-19 pandemic on market capitalization capabilities in Africa. Health data from various reports of the World Health Organization (WHO) is regressed on the all-share index from World Development Indicators (WDI) to establish a clear line of thought. It is found that the growth of confirmed cases and attributable deaths are inversely related to the growth in market capitalization in Africa. The findings from this study show that Africa market capitalization is inversely related to total growth in the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and attributable COVID-19 deaths. This leads to the assertion that Africa’s capital market is fast nosediving in the time of COVID-19 due to global uncertainties caused by the pandemic. With no known cure or vaccine procedure discovered yet, the global uncertainty around the novel coronavirus disease will lead to approximately 0.56 percentage decrease in market capitalization in Africa. To this end, emphases must be laid on identifying and including non-traditional sources of financing strictly tied to projects that could encourage institutional investors. It is therefore equally imperative for Africa to form a formidable and integrated capital market among themselves.  Keywords: market capitalization; COVID-19 pandemic, negative binomial Regression, poisson, Regression, Africa JEL Classification: C10, C31, G15, I12

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