Despite the magnitude of remittances as an alternative source of investment financing in Africa, the financial sector in Africa has significantly remained underdeveloped and unstable. Finding a solution to Africa's financial deregulation problems has proved tenacious partly because of inadequate literature that explain the nature of Africa capital and financial markets which has shown to be unorganised, spatially fragmented, highly segmented and invariably externally dependent. We examine the structural linkages between remittances and financial sector development in Africa. Panel data on indices of remittances was regressed on indices of financial sector development in fifty-three (53) African countries from 1986 through 2017 using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimation procedure. We accounted for cross-sectional dependence inherent in ordinary panel estimation and found a basis for the strict orthogonal relationship among the variables. Findings revealed a positive long-run relationship between remittances and financial development with a significant (positive) short-run relationship. It is suggested that, while attracting migrants' transfers which can have significant short-run poverty-alleviating advantages, in the long run, it might be more beneficial for African governments to foster financial sector development using alternative financial development strategies.

This paper explores by re-examining to what extent trade liberalisation has contributed to the capital inflows (both the private capital inflows and public capital inflow) on economic growth; and their interactive relationship in Nigeria between 1985 and 2018. Time series for each of the variables were collected from secondary sources on yearly basis, extracted from World Development Indicators (WDI) and the variables were measured as percentage of GDP, while Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique is used to show the extent to which the variables were co-integrated and established that both private capital inflows and public capital inflows with the helps of trade liberalization inhibited economic growth in Nigeria. The study further revealed that the coefficient of error correction was negative and highly significant, as well as establishing long-term cointegration. Also, our study affirms partial existence of Bhagwati's hypothesis. Hence, the government needs to restructure and reengineer most of its trade policies, in order to significantly mpact various forms of foreign capital inflows, and subsequently enhance economic growth by creating an enabling economic environment to facilitate adequate inflows of capital inflows.

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This paper examines the effect of macroeconomic variables, demographic factors toward current account balance in Nigeria. It analyzed the connection between each of domestic savings and investment on current account balance by examining the role and direction of the selected demographic variables. The Toda-Yamamoto approach to causality was used to analyze the study. The result shows that the direction of causality was from both domestic saving and investment to current account balance. However, there is no reverse causation from the current account balance to domestic saving and investment. Thus, the selected demographic variables had no significant causation towards current account balance, investment, and domestic saving. The government needs to finance the desired investment through increased domestic saving without undue reliance on foreign resources

Purpose -This paper aims to examine the relationship between the shadow economy and income inequality in Nigeria.Method -The paper employed Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS), and Granger causality. This methodology is used to avoid endogeneity and heterogeneity in the model. This paper gauged income inequality using two diverse indicators of the Gini coefficient: the Gini index in proportion to household disposable income and the Gini index in proportion to household market income. In accordance with the literature, our empirical analysis draws on data from the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID), the World Bank, World Development Indicators, and the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) for Nigeria from 1991 to 2018.Result -The findings of ARDL and FMOLS suggested a positive relationship between income inequality and the shadow economy, based on both measures of income inequality. In the short term, however, the shadow economy and income inequality are negatively correlated. Furthermore, we discovered a one-way causal relationship exists in Nigeria between the shadow economy, household disposable income, institutional democracy, household market income, and corruption control (CCI). Recommendation -Shadow economy has been regarded as an avenue to create job opportunities and raise poverty-income levels. It is critical that, for the shadow economy to reduce income inequality in Nigeria, policymakers should develop much better policies aimed at addressing income inequality.Contribution -In order to understand the relationship between income inequality and shadow economy activities in Nigeria, this study employed three methodologies, namely: Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL), Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS), and Granger Causality. The result offers reliable recommendations for pro-poor interventions that aim to limit the growth of informality via redistributing incomes.