The study examines the effect of investment in telecommunication infrastructure on economic growth in Nigeria. Using time series data from 1980 and 2012, the study employs autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach proposed by Pesaran et al., (2001) to estimate the long run and short run effect of investment in telecommunication infrastructure on economic growth. The result from cointegration test showed presence of long run relationship between dependent and all explanatory variables. The study found foreign direct investment in information and communication technology more effective in improving and raising economic growth in Nigeria than government investment. The output from Chow breakpoint test shows that the liberalization of telecommunication industry introduced in 1992 has significant effect on economic growth in Nigeria. Therefore, it is imperative for Nigerian government to increase its spending on telecom and attract more foreign investment in telecommunication in order to boost productivity and economic growth.

Research background: Health outcome such as infant mortality rate is an important measure of the standard of living. It is a part of Millennium Development Goals, which all countries of the World strive to achieve, by allocating enormous economic resources to the health sector respectively. Purpose: The study assessed the impact of government expenditure on health and on health outcome (infant mortality rate) in the West Africa Sub-region. Research methodology: Secondary data were collected from 2000 to 2015 on thirteen countries in the Sub-region. Owing to the fact that the nature of the data involved is macro-panel data, the study performed the pre-estimation test (such as panel unit-root test and co-integration test) to ascertain the time series properties of the series. Based on the results of the pre-estimation tests, the work employed the fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS). Results: It is found in the study that public health spending has an indirect impact on infant mortality rate in the West Africa Sub-region. Novelty: No extant study examined the impact of public expenditure on health and on maternal mortality rate using the West Africa Sub-region as an area of coverage. This study employed a fully modified OLS (FMOLS) to assess the impact of public expenditure on health and on infant mortality rate in the West Africa Sub-region.

The study investigated the effect of fiscal policy on crowding out capital inflows in Nigeria using annual data between 1970 and 2011 by using the foreign direct investment (FDI) as proxy to capital inflows represent the dependent variable, budget deficit (BD), foreign borrowing (FL) and domestic borrowing (DL) as proxies to fiscal policy are placed as explanatory variables. Cointegration and ECM technique were employed. Our finding showed that in both the short and long run, BD does not crowd out but rather crowd in FDI. In the short run, DL averagely has significant positive impact on FDI.  However, in the long run, DL has significant negative impact on FDI. More so, in both short run and long run period, FL has significant negative impact on FDI, therefore, FL crowds out FDI. The speed of adjustment back to equilibrium showed that the explanatory variables have capacity to adjust FDI significantly. The study recommends that the government could try to be aware of the implication of its fiscal policy in running a budget deficit and making proper decision in sourcing for funds to finance the deficit. Foreign borrowing is less expensive in financing budget deficit, so if the government must borrow, it should give preference to this source. Generally, the government should reduce deficit because of the implications inherent in it.

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