The aim of this exploratory research is to examine the foreign direct investment (FDI) – financial development (FD) nexus and to analyse the strength of relationships among FDI measures. The study employed structural equation modelling (SEM) on selected data from the World Development Indicators (WDI) from 1979 to 2016 to achieve the modest goal of this paper. The study established that FDI inflows are precursors of a vibrant and well-developed financial institution in emerging economies. We also found positive and negative correlations amongst the FDI measures, which suggest they move pari passu in stimulating the FD of an economy. A notable feature of this study is in the employment of SEM empirical strategy to shed light on the FDI-FI nexus. The study concluded that emerging economies must focus on the creation of a congenial investment climate to attract FDI inflows, which pivots robust financial institutions because of their cascading effects on the overall economy.

Purpose While there are enormous studies on the determinants of environmental degradation, empirical studies on the effect of renewable energy consumption and economic growth on the environment remain limited. The purpose of this paper is to examine the asymmetric effect of renewable energy consumption and economic growth on environmental degradation in 31 selected sub-Saharan African countries spanning from 1990 to 2018. Design/methodology/approach To examine possible asymmetric effects of the exogenous variables on environmental degradation, we used the panel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag approach and secondary data was sourced from the World Bank (2021). Findings The cointegration test results suggest that there is a long-run cointegration among the variables whereas our main findings indicate that environmental degradation responds asymmetrically to changes in renewable energy consumption and economic growth. The results further reveal that both positive and negative shocks in renewable energy consumption reduce environmental degradation. On the other hand, positive and negative shocks in economic growth increase environmental degradation in the long run. Research limitations/implications The implications of this study include the need for policymakers in sub-Saharan Africa to encourage the utilization of renewable energy as it reduces environmental degradation. Also, governments in the subregion should gradually replace the usage of fossil fuels by adapting renewable energy sources so as to achieve higher economic growth. Originality/value The positive and negative shocks of renewable energy consumption and economic growth on environmental degradation are examined to ascertain their asymmetric relationships.

The number of studies investigating the effects of inflation targeting (IT) on inflation and macroeconomic variables has increased with the rising number of countries adopting IT. The empirical evidence has, however, failed to converge. In line with the need for more such studies, this paper uses a difference-in-differences (DID) model with dynamic panel fixed effect and instrumental variable (IV) techniques to estimate the effect of IT on inflation and economic growth for a sample of 40 middle-income countries. Generally, we find that the effects of IT on inflation is quantitatively large but statistically insignificant. We, however, find strong evidence that IT leads to higher growth in middle-income countries.

No abstract

No abstract