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The purpose of this paper is to develop and apply a distributional impact assessment methodology to empirically analyze distributional impact of public expenditure on human development using data from 20 states in Nigeria. For robustness of the analysis, expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development, energy, housing, environmental protection and portable water resources are employed as predictors of human development. The result reveals that expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development. In contrast, the marginal impact of energy, housing and environmental protection is negative. Among the sectors, education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources expenditure has positive marginal impact while energy, housing and environmental protection have decreasing marginal impact on human development.

Panel approach.

The result reveals that expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development.

A panel approach is used to investigate whether expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development.

While environmental sustainability may have been intensified by different occurrences such as global warming, increased carbon emission, loss of biodiversity and natural resource depletion, there are concerns that rising population combined with the quality of institutions have serious implications on the attainment of environmental sustainability. While this may seem factual, tackling environmental problems by adopting population reduction policies might not necessarily guarantee a sustainable environment without addressing the quality of institutions. This chapter examines the effect of population growth on environmental sustainability as well as the interactive effect of population growth and institutional quality on environmental sustainability in West Africa region, using data from 2006 to 2019. Adopting the System Generalized Method of Moment method, findings indicate that population growth has a positive but insignificant effect on environmental sustainability. Population growth when interacted with institutional quality had negative and significant effect on environmental sustainability. The result demonstrates that environmental problems cannot be effectively addressed through population policy alone, hence the additional need for strong and institutional quality to ensure environmental sustainability in the region.

In addition to their effects on economic growth, prolonged terrorist activities can reduce government revenue. Apart from the destruction of physical infrastructure and human capital, terrorism also has lagged-effect on investment, which ultimately dampens the fiscal position and further affects the economic growth. This chapter is devoted to the discussion on the interaction between terrorism, growth, and fiscal variables in Nigeria using real per capita income, government revenue, government expenditure and defense expenditure. The findings show that terrorism is associated with low economic growth which has the potency to reduce government expenditure. It was also observed that government expenditure can be improved by fostering government revenue. In view of this, apart from domestic efforts, interventions of international communities are further needed to reduce the drastic effects of terrorism, especially in meeting and improving expenditure on growth-enhancing sectors.

Taking global economic integration into consideration, this study investigates the effects of the imposition of the tariff. For every tariff increase, a percentage of the trade volume is reduced. This means, there is a tradeoff between globalization and restricted trade. This chapter presents empirical evidence from the European Union and the Sub-Saharan Africa region using annual times series for the period, 1980–2019. Result indicates that with coefficient of 4.31 percent, the tradeoff in European Union is higher than Sub-Saharan Africa region with coefficient of 2.66 percent. Implied is that developing countries are more likely to suffer more from the negative effect of globalization due to trade restrictions than the developed countries of the world. This is an indication that whether in developed or developing countries, a tradeoff exists between globalization and restricted trade. Hence, the imposition of tariffs and counter-tariffs is capable of shutting down globalization.

This study is motivated by the fact that even though many African countries have witnessed rapid growth, they have also experienced high volatility in the form of severe financial crises, especially in the last two decades. These developments naturally lead to the issue of whether, in a more integrated global economy, the relationship between growth and output volatility has changed. The phenomena have also raised questions on whether the growth–output volatility relationship can be linked to the growing pains seemingly associated with rising trade and financial integration. This chapter attempts to provide answer to these questions by providing insights on how trade and financial integration affect the relationship between growth and output volatility using data from selected Africa countries. The study explores in detail the relationship between growth and the volatility of output components (consumption and investment). Our main result is that there is a positive growth and output volatility impact of trade openness and integration with the international financial market. The relationship between growth and financial integration and investment volatility is stronger in the long run than in the short run, while the consumption volatility impact of trade openness is higher in the long run than in the short run, suggesting that countries that are more open to trade appear to face less severe trade-off between growth and volatility.

This chapter examines the relationship between the gender gap in labor force participation, intensive growth and economic welfare in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) from 1981 to 2020 under the framework of the classical production function. The generalized method of moment (GMM) technique was employed in analyzing the data. The empirical result showed a negative and significant effect of the gender gap in labor force participation on intensive growth. It was also found that the gender gap in labor force participation had a negative and insignificant effect on economic welfare in SSA. Other findings showed that male labor force participation had a positive and insignificant effect on both intensive growth and economic welfare, while female labor force participation had a negative and significant effect on intensive growth and a negative and insignificant effect on economic welfare. Trade openness had a positive and significant effect on both intensive growth and economic welfare. Based on the findings, narrowing the gender gap in labor force participation has to be given more considerable attention in the SSA region.