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Background: One of the principal goals of monetary policy pursued by Central Banks worldwide is virtually price stability. Understanding inflationary dispositions and its determinants is therefore a critical issue from the monetary authorities, scholars and the policy makers viewpoint. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the budget deficit and inflation nexus for Uganda for the period 1980-2016. This is because budget deficit in Uganda has been one of the top topical issues of concern in the country's historical economic problems. The study employs the cointegration and error correction model (ECM) as well as the pairwise Granger causality. This is because the ECM technique has become a tool of choice for estimation and testing the multivariate relationships among the non-stationary data in much of the time series macro-econometrics. Results: Results of the Granger causality test show that budget deficit Granger causes inflation in Uganda at a conventional level of significance. However, no feedback effect is observed. The cointegration results reveal a positive and statistically significant long-run relationship between the series, and the results of the ECM reveal that budget deficit causes inflation in Uganda only in the short run. Further, in Uganda, budget deficit affects inflation directly and indirectly through fluctuations in the nominal exchange rate and money supply. Conclusions: The main conclusion from this analysis is the existence of the longrun relationship among inflation, budget deficit and money supply. This was thus an indication of Granger causality in at least one direction among the variables. However, the impact of trade balance and exchange rate were taken as exogenous. A long-run stationary relationship between the budget deficit, money supply, inflation, trade balance and the exchange rate has been found to hold for Uganda. The major implications for this study are that inflation in Uganda is caused by both monetary as well as fiscal factors. A comprehensive policy package involving budgetary, monetary as well as exchange rate policies is required to deal with inflation.

Background: Empirical evidence on the effect of public debt on the economic growth of a country remains ambiguous. No theoretical convergence on the respective nexus has been attained. For the case of Uganda in particular, the public debt question remains critical in the country's development trajectory. Under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) initiative, Uganda was the first country to receive a debt relief of worth US$650 million in the 1990s and later in 2006, under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), the country generously received 100% debt forgiveness/cancelation which consequently reduced the stock of country's debt to $1.6 billion. However, of recent, the debt stock has kept on increasing from UGX 14.257 trillion ($5.5 billion) in 2000 to the current UGX 35.3 trillion (9.8b) in July 2017 and it is projected to continue increasing in the short to medium term given the robust NDPII core projects and priorities which are set to attract more borrowing. The study employs the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)-bounds testing approach which is superior and suitable for our small sample. Results: The results reveal that public debt has a significant negative impact on economic growth in short run whereas in long-run debt has a mixed impact on Uganda's economy. The total debt service has a negative impact whereas Gross debt as a share of GDP has a positive impact on the economy. The findings also reveal that Public debt has a negative effect on Uganda's economic growth in the short run. The impact is however found to be positive in the long run. This result is in line with the study expectations and some findings by earlier researchers who found a negative impact of public debt on GDP and investment. The results suggest that the current trend of Uganda's borrowing is to continue constraining the resources in the short run. Conclusion: The conclusion of the study in view of emerging findings especially on debt, various policy implications have emerged. At the current rate of borrowing, Uganda is likely to have deteriorating economic growth partly because such public borrowing adversely affects investment. The study thus recommends for policies geared toward efficient use of borrowed funds especially for such projects that have high potential to unlock the production capabilities of the country. There is a need for

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease has taken the world by storm, given the containment measures better known as the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), including strict or mild lockdowns and social distancing measures. The impact of these aggregated measures have caused not only loss of lives but also financial, economic, social and even political unrest around the world and Uganda has not been spared either, given its weak economic and health care system (UBOS 2020). This study thus was designed to investigate the impact of COVID-19 lockdown measures and its associated self-reported threat on the female labor force participation (FLFP) in Uganda following the March 20th 2020 shutdown of the economy by the government. The interest in women in this study stems from the fact that despite economic activity shutdown, women’s work and roles extend beyond their office space to their home. Therefore using the first round of the Uganda High-Frequency Phone Survey on COVID-19 (UHFS) dataset conducted by Uganda Bureau of Statistic (UBOS) following the lockdown measure, our results indicates a 17% reduction in FLFP in the early days of the economic shutdown. We further find larger impacts of lockdown on female labor force participation in extreme cases where both partners are under locked down. These impacts are more pronounced among women with children as opposed to those without children. Conversely our results indicates larger impacts of lockdown among those with initial conditions of unemployment prior to the outbreak than those who were employed in time following the pandemic outbreak. We see our results as being consistent with the famous household labor theories. Our results point to the need for preferential treatment for women to encourage and enhance their labor market participation in times of pandemic. Lastly social programs targeting particularly women should be designed and implemented under the ministry of Gender Labor and Social Development.

Does uncertainty inevitably alter how Uganda’s fiscal policy and influences the country’s economic growth? Using the most recent datasets and rigorous econometric practice, we offer an empirical response to this fundamental topic. Indeed, several nations frequently tweak their fiscal policies as a way to give countercyclical stimulus during periods of uncertainty. In fact, the operations of fiscal policy fluctuate regularly with the sequence of uncertainty and thus create a two-way interaction between fiscal policy, uncertainty, and output growth. We demonstrate using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model that in the presence of uncertainty, tax revenue and expenditure are most affected, whereas borrowing is least affected both in the short and long term. Consequently, the fragility of rising global and domestic uncertainty is destined to generate huge and considerable divergences between the predicted and the actual growth outturn unless government macroeconomic frameworks adequately include economic uncertainties in estimates. As a result, we urge that borrowing be used as effectively as possible to promote and maintain growth. While tax revenues have been shown to promote growth in both the short- and long-term, the effect will inevitably diminish in the face of uncertainty.