Contribution/Originality: This study contributes to the existing literature and presents the long-run impact of COVID-19 pandemic on economic growth and poverty alleviation in the global context. INTRODUCTIONThe Global COVID-19 pandemic has infected millions of the world's population at a shocking speed. Its emergence has halted and brought down economic activities across the globe due to the imposition on mobility to curtail the disease's spread. Over some decades, the world has not witnessed such an experience. However, it has a significant toll on various economies due to shocks emanating from deteriorating human and health conditions (World Bank, 2020). This pandemic is exceedingly a health crisis but social and economic crises due to the effects it has had on lives and economies at large. Moreover, the pandemic's impact would be heterogeneous from country to country, and it is likely to widen inequalities and poverty globally. This development would stall the progress made to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, requiring much attention and urgent response (United Nations Development Programme, 2020). According to Sarkodie and Owusu (2020), the nexus of environment-healtheconomic impact on human lives and countries at large have become necessary due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the global pandemic brought about the need to show much concern about the consequences

Contribution/Originality: This study contributes in the existing literature on financial inclusion but presents a dynamic methodology by assessing the dynamic relationship that exists between financial inclusion and poverty alleviation in the region of West Africa.

This study examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and ecological innovation on carbon (CO2) emissions in a panel of 18 developed countries from 2005 to 2018 using second-generation time-series panel data techniques. We use three robust long-run estimators, namely two-stage least squares (2SLS), panel generalised method of moments (GMM) and generalised least squares (GLS), to resolve heterogeneity, endogeneity and simultaneity in the panels. We further performed causality tests to ascertain the direction of causality between the variables. Our estimations suggest three innovative findings. First, economic growth contributes significantly and positively to CO2 emissions; however, this happens at an optimal level of growth after which carbon emission reduces, indicating that our sample exhibits an inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) relationship. Second, the impact of EPU on CO2 emissions is diverse: high levels of EPU have a significant influence on CO2 emissions only in high-polluting countries but not in low-polluting ones. Thirdly, research and development (R&D), foreign direct investment (FDI), urbanisation and renewable energy (RE) usage were also found to have varying effects on CO2 emissions. These findings highlight the heterogeneous relationship between carbon emissions and economic indicators even in advanced economies, as the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) holds true in high-pollution countries while the pollution halo effect holds for low-pollution ones. A key policy implication of this work is that the quest to mitigate emissions should not be a one-size-fits-all approach because not every country’s urbanisation rate, FDI inflows, R&D and renewable energy consumption directly affect CO2 emissions in the face of economic policy uncertainties.

Foreign aid with the aim of propagating growth and development in developing countries has been in existence since the end of World War II. Africa as the recipient of aid over this period is still wallowing in poverty and underdevelopment. This phenomenon has interested many researchers and donor agencies to unravel the true impact of aid to the developmental agenda of Africa but the findings are mixed and inconsistent. Our study focused on 50 African countries for the period

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