Purpose Interaction between environmental pollution and economic growth determines the achievement of the green growth objective of developing economies. An economy turns around the inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) when pollution is effectively dampened by social, political and economic factors as such economy grows. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the EKC considering the impact of institutional quality on six variables of environmental pollution (carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O), suspended particulate matters (SPM), rainfall, temperature and total greenhouse emission (TGH)) using the case of Nigeria. Design/methodology/approach The EKC model includes population density, education expenditure, foreign direct investment and gross domestic investment as control variables, and it was analysed using the autoregressive distribution lag (ARDL) econometric technique, which has not been applied in the literature on Nigeria. Findings The results, inter alia, indicate that there is EKC for CO2 and SPM. This implies that the green growth objective can be pursued in Nigeria with concerted efforts. Other environmental pollution indicators did not exert significant influence on economic growth. Practical implications Therefore, it is recommended that Nigeria’s institutional quality be strengthened to limit environmental pollution in light of economic growth. Originality/value Previous studies are yet to apply a more developed econometric method, like the ARDL, to estimate the EKC model for Nigeria. This study fills this observed knowledge gap.

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The main features of poverty are low levels of consumption and income, a fact-of-life in most African countries. This paper analyzes the fundamental trends of per capita income, government capital expenditure, the human development index, and the rate of unemployment in the Nigeria. A vector autoregressive model finds that: A reduced unemployment rate improves human development and consequently reduces poverty. As growth in public capital expenditure rises, unemployment falls and the human development index improves. Therefore, infrastructure-based policies, which initially reduce unemployment, will also improve the living conditions of Nigerians in the end.Poverty, Unemployment, Standard of living, Income inequality, JEL Code: O55,

The study examines the relative contributions of external shocks and institutional quality to macroeconomic performance in Nigeria, using Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) approach. The study establishes the dominance of the relative contributions of external shocks measures over institutional quality to macroeconomic performance in the country. Even though the dominance of terms of trade and foreign aid is highlighted, the role of institutional quality is equally important as it also has significant positive effect on performance. The study concludes that both external shocks and institutional quality play significant roles, and hence, posits the existence of favorable institutional environments as a panacea to successfully absorbing the influence of external shocks which are exogenous to the economy.

The paper examined contributions of foreign direct investment, globalization to real economic growth fluctuation in selected sub-Saharan Africa countries. Adopting the conventional vector autoregressive mechanism the time series data from the selected countries, the result showed that out of the eleven countries studied, foreign direct investment explained the highest proportion in just three countries, Morocco, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. Except in Tunisia, Tanzania and Kenya, where the degree of economic openness explained substantial proportion of the output fluctuations, the variations in most of the countries were explained by factors beyond foreign direct investment and economic openness. The result supports the existing finding on African economies that trade liberalization had not substantially impaired economic growth process of the sub African economies as alluded to by previous studies. The upsurge in the capital flows to African economies was also insufficient insulate the economic from the global meltdown and furthermore kick start post crisis economy recovery in Southern African countries. Therefore, the paper concludes that fluctuations in real economic growth in these countries might be beyond the external shocks from the capital inflows and trade flows.