The study investigates the determinants of selected manufactured imports in Nigeria with a special focus on the role of domestic production. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) in the context of new trade theory was utilised with data coverage between 1985 and 2016. Results show that imports of various manufactured products are affected differently by some factors. In particular, domestic output of electrical & electronics have a significant and negative effect on own imports. However, there was no significant effect of domestic production of petroleum products on imports of the same goods. Also, the effect of domestic output of food & beverages on imports of same product is positive. Further, the sensitivity of imports to exchange rate changes differ across products, in some it have immediate effect while in some it delays for a year. In the same vein, while GDP is an important driver of imports of some products, it is unimportant for some. Also, it is only food & beverages imports that significantly respond to change in tariffs. The overall conclusion from this study is that drivers of import demand differ across products.

Regulation efficiency is essential in addressing the growing informal sector in developing countries because informality thrives with an inefficient legal and regulatory framework of an economy. This paper, therefore, seeks to explore the effect of regulations on informal employment across a panel of 36 sub-Saharan Africa from 2005 to 2018. The study includes both the business and labour aspects of regulation to analyse the effect. The fixed effect and GMM method of panel regression analysis was adopted to achieve the objective of the study. The result suggests that an increase in labour regulation efficiency is associated with a reduction in informal employment while there exists no significant relationship between efficient business regulation and informal employment. The study further investigates how the outcomes affect both genders and the output. The study suggests that efficient labour regulation is gender-specific, as the result is only consistent for the male. It is therefore imperative to incorporate more female gender-specific incentives in the social and labour regulations to compensate for the imbalance of social roles of women that may affect their choice to work in the formal or informal sector.