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This article investigates the dynamic implication of healthcare expenditure on economic growth in the selected ten Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000–2018.

The study methodology included dynamic heterogenous panel, using mean group and pooled mean group estimators. The investigation of the healthcare expenditure and economic growth nexus was achieved while controlling the effects of investment, savings, labor force and life expectancy via interaction terms.

The results from linear healthcare expenditure have a significant positive impact on economic growth, while the nonlinear estimates through the interaction terms between healthcare expenditure and investment have a negative statistically significant impact on growth. The marginal effect of healthcare expenditure evaluated at the minimum and maximum level of investment is positive, suggesting the impact of health expenditure on growth does not vary with the level of investments. This result responds to the primary objective of the article.

In policy terms, the impact of investment on healthcare is essential to addressing future health crises. The impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can never be separated from the shortages or low prioritization of health against other sectors of the economy. The article also provides an insight to policymakers on the demand for policy reform that will boost and make the health sector attractive to both domestic and foreign direct investment.

Given the vulnerability of SSA to the health crisis, there are limited studies to examine this phenomenon and first to address the needed investment priorities to the health sector infrastructure in SSA.

This paper aims to use the newly developed panel data cointegration analysis and the dynamic time series modeling approach to examine the linkages between financial structure (market‐based vs bank‐based) and economic growth in African economies.

The research investigates the dynamic relationship between financial structure and economic growth in a panel of a group of seven African developing countries over the period of 1986‐2007. The paper uses various indicators/measures of financial structure and financial system, and employs the traditional time‐series analysis for causality as well as the newly developed panel unit root and cointegration techniques and estimated finance‐growth relationship using FMOLS for heterogeneous panel.

From the dynamic heterogeneous panel approach, the paper firstly finds that market‐based financial system is important for explaining output growth through enhancing efficiency and productivity. Second, the authors' empirical evidence supports the view that higher levels of banking system development are positively associated with capital accumulation growth and lead to faster rates of economic growth.

Panel cointegration, group mean panel FMOLS and country‐by‐country time series investigations indicate that the market‐based financial system is important for explaining output growth through enhancing efficiency and productivity, whereas the development of banking system is significantly associated with capital accumulation growth. Further results from the time‐series approach show evidence of unidirectional causality running from market‐oriented as well as bank‐oriented financial systems to economic growth.

With heterogeneous findings dominating the growth and natural resources relations, there is a need to explain the variances in Africa's growth process as induced by robust measures of factor endowments. This study used a comprehensive set of data from the updated database of the World Bank to capture the heterogeneous dimensions of natural resource endowments on growth with a particular focus on establishing complementary evidence on the resource curse hypothesis in energy and environmental economics literature in Africa. These comprehensive data on oil rent, coal rent and forest rent could provide new and insightful evidence on obscure relations on the subject matter.

This paper considers the panel vector error correction model (PVECM) procedure to explain changes in economic growth outcomes as induced by oil rent, coal rent and forest rent. The consideration of the PVECM was premised on the panel unit root process that returns series that were cointegrated at the first-order differentials.

The paper found positive relations between oil rent, coal rent and economic development in Africa. Forest rent, on the other hand, is inversely related to economic growth in Africa. Trade and human capital are positively related to economic growth in Africa, while population growth is negatively associated with economic growth in Africa.

Short-run policies should be tailored towards the stability of fiscal expenditure such that the objective of fiscal policy, which is to maintain the condition of full employment and economic stability and stabilise the rate of growth, can be optimised and sustained. By this, the resource curse will be averted and productive capacity will increase, leading to sustainable growth and development in Africa, where conditions for growth and development remain inadequately met.

The originality of this paper can be viewed from the strength of its arguments and methods adopted to address the questions raised in this paper. This study further illuminated age-long obscure relations in the literature of natural resource endowment and economic growth by taking a disaggregated approach to the component-by-component analysis of natural resources factors (the oil rent, coal rent and forest rent) and their corresponding influence on economic growth in Africa. This pattern remains underexplored mainly in previous literature on the subject. Many African countries are blessed with an abundance of these different natural resources in varying proportions. The misuse and mismanagement of these resources along various dimensions have been the core of the inclination towards the resource curse hypothesis in Africa. Knowing how growth conditions respond to changes in the depth of forest resources, oil resources and coal resources could be useful pointers in Africa's overall energy use and management. This study contributed to the literature on natural resource-induced growth dynamics by offering a generalisable conclusion as to why natural resource-abundance economies are prone to poor economic performance. This study further asks if mineral deposits are a source or reflection of ill growth and underdevelopment in African countries.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the growth threshold effect on renewable energy consumption (REC) in the major oil-producing countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the period 1990–2018.

This article used a dynamic panel threshold regression model introduced by Hansen (1996, 1999 and 2000) threshold (TR) models. The procedure is achieved using 5,000 bootstrapping replications and the grid search to obtain the asymptotic distribution and p-values. For the long-run relationship among our variables, the author followed the process in Pesaran et al. (1999) pooled mean group (PMG) for heterogeneous panels. Furthermore, for the robustness of our empirical results due to the sensitivity of the results to outliers, the author used the approach by Cook (1979) distance measure. The author applied quantile (QR) regression to explore the distribution of dependent variables following Bassett and Koenker (1982) and Koenker and Bassett (1978) approaches.

The results from the threshold effect test and threshold regression revealed a significant single threshold effect of growth level on REC. Furthermore, the result from the PMG estimation showed the growth of the variable, energy intensity, consumer prices and CO₂ emissions play a significant role in REC in major oil-producing countries in SSA. The growth threshold estimation results indicated one significant threshold value of 1.013% at one period lagged of real growth. The outlier’s sensitivity detention greatly influenced our empirical results.

The article filled the literature gap by applying a combined measure that is robustness to detect outliers in the data, which none of the studies in the literature addresses hitherto. Further, the article extends the quantile regression to growth – REC literature.

The authors estimate the multiplier effect of government public infrastructure investment in Spain. This paper aims to use annual data of the 17 Spanish autonomous communities for the 1980–2016 period.

The authors use dynamic acyclic graphs and the heterogeneous panel structural vector autoregressive (P-SVAR) method of Pedroni (2013). This method is robust to cross-sectional heterogeneity and dependence, which are present in the data.

The findings suggest that an increase in the level of government public infrastructure investment generates a positive and persistent effect on the level of output. Five years after the fiscal expansion, the multiplier effects of government public infrastructure investment reach values above one. This confirms that government public infrastructure investment expansions have Keynesian effects. The authors also find that the multiplier effects differ between autonomous communities with above-average and below-average GDP per capita.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no research uses dynamic acyclic graphs and heterogeneous P-SVAR techniques to estimate fiscal multipliers of government public investment in Spain by using subnational data.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyse how different exchange rate regimes affect the links between monetary fundamentals and exchange rates in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Using the Pedroni method for panel cointegration, mean group and pooled mean group and the panel vector autoregressive technique, this study empirically investigates whether monetary fundamentals impact exchange rates similarly in both regimes. Thus, the author acquires needed and credible empirical data.

The result suggests that the impact is dissimilar. In the floating regime, an increase in relative money supply and relative real output depreciates and appreciates the nominal exchange rate in the long run whereas in the non-floating regime, the evidence is mixed. Thus, exchange rates bear a theoretically consistent relationship with monetary fundamentals across SSA countries with floating regimes but fails under non-floating regimes. This provides evidence that regime choice is important if the relationship between monetary fundamentals and exchange rates in SSA are to be theoretically consistent.

This study empirically incorporates the dissimilarities in exchange rate regimes in a panel framework and study the links between exchange rates and monetary fundamentals. The focus on how exchange rate regimes might alter the equilibrium relationships between exchange rates and monetary fundamentals in SSA is a pioneering experiment.

This study aims to measure the relationship between demand and exchange rate shocks in the tourism industry.

A panel data set is constructed covering the period between 1995 and 2017, and the data set includes the top 26 countries that host 10 million tourists and above in the world as of 2017. The standard errors of the series are used as an indicator of shocks. First, the cross-sectional dependency, stationarity and the homogeneity of the series are examined; second, a panel cointegration analysis is implemented; third, long-term panel cointegration coefficients are analyzed with Dynamic Common Correlated Effects (DCCE) approach; and, finally, Dumitrescu and Hurlin’s (2012) Granger non-causality test is used to detect the causality.

The preliminary analyses show that the variables are cross-sectional dependent and heterogeneous and are stationary in their first difference; hence, the effects of the shocks are temporary. On the other hand, as a result of the panel cointegration analysis, it is found that both series are cointegrated over the long-term. However, the long-term coefficients estimated with the DCCE approach are found not to be statistically significant. Finally, as a result of the Dumitrescu and Hurlin’s (2012) Granger non-causality test, it is concluded that there is a causality running from exchange rate shocks to demand shocks.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the cointegration between the tourism demand shocks and exchange rates shocks has not been investigated before, and therefore, this study is considered to be a pioneering study that will contribute to the literature.

The purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the relationship between fiscal policy and total factor productivity (TFP) while accounting for several economic and econometric issues of the phenomenon like non-stationarity, fiscal feedback effects, persistence in productivity, country heterogeneity and unobserved global shocks and local spillovers affecting heterogeneously the countries in the sample.

The paper is empirical. It builds an Error Correction Model (ECM) specification within a dynamic heterogeneous framework with common correlated effects and models both reverse causality and feedback effects.

The results of this study highlight some new findings relative to the existing related literature. The outcomes suggest some relevant evidence at both the academic and policy levels: (1) the causal effects going from fiscal deficit/surplus to TFP are heterogeneous across countries; (2) the effects depend on the time horizon considered; (3) the long-run dynamics of TFP are positively impacted by improvements in fiscal budget, but only if the austerity measures do not exert slowdowns in aggregate growth.

The main originality of this study is methodological, with possible extensions to related phenomena. Relative to the existing literature, the gains of this study rely on the way econometric techniques, recently proposed in the literature, are adapted to the economic relationship of interest. The endogeneity due to the existence of reverse causality is modelled without implying relevant performance losses of the models. Moreover, this is the first article that questions whether the effects of fiscal budget on productivity depend on the impact of the former on aggregate output growth, thus emphasising the importance of the quality of fiscal adjustments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth in Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries over the period 1980-2012. It also investigates whether the causal relationship between FDI inflows and economic growth is dependent on the level of income.

In order to assess whether the causal relationship between FDI inflows and economic growth is dependent on the level of income, the study divided the SADC countries into two groups, namely, the middle-income countries and the low-income countries. The study used the recent panel-data analysis methods to examine this linkage. The Granger causality test for the middle-income countries was conducted within a vector-error correction mechanism framework; while that of the low-income countries was conducted within a vector autoregressions framework.

The results for the middle-income countries’ panel show that there is a uni-directional causal flow from GDP to FDI, and not vice versa. However, for the low-income countries’ panel, there was no evidence of causality in either direction. The study concludes that the FDI-led growth hypothesis does not apply to SADC countries.

Methodology applied in this study is a bivariate framework which is likely to suffer from the omission of variable bias (Odhiambo, 2008, 2011). Second, the Granger causality analysis employed in this only investigates the direction of causality and whether each variable can be used to explain another, but does not directly test for the mechanisms through which FDI leads to economic growth and economic growth leads to FDI.

Future studies may include a third variable such as domestic savings, exports, or financial development in a trivariate or multivariate panel causality model. A more complete analysis which seeks to explain the channels through which FDI impacts growth is suggested for future studies. Lastly, sector level analysis will help policy makers draft effective industrial policies, which can guide allocation of incentives.

The results of this study support the Growth-led FDI hypothesis, but not the FDI-led growth hypothesis. In other words, it is economic growth that drives FDI inflows into the SADC region and into Southern Africa, and not vice versa. This implies that the recent high economic growth rates that have been recorded in some of the SADC countries, especially the middle-income countries, have led to a massive inflow of FDI into this region.

At the regional level, SADC as a regional bloc has been actively pursuing policies and strategies aimed at attracting FDI into the region. Despite the important role of FDI in economic development, and the increase in FDI inflows into SADC countries in particular, there is a significant dearth of literature on the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth. The study used the recent panel-data analysis methods to examine the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth in SADC countries.

Causality between corporate financial performance (CFP) and corporate social performance (CSP) has been extensively debated in previous research works; however, little research has been done to investigate the long-run dynamics between these two constructs. The purpose of this paper is to enrich the CFP–CSP literature by estimating the long-run equilibrium relationship between financial performance and social performance in the banking sector in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries over the period 2009–2019.

The paper adopts an approach that is primarily used in financial economics: first, the authors perform panel long-run Granger causality following Canning and Pedroni’s procedure to indicate the direction of the causal relationship. Second, the authors estimate an error correction model using Chudik and Pesaran’s (2015) dynamic common correlated effects mean group estimator to determine the sign of the relationship.

The present research findings prove the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between CFP and CSP, while indicating at the same time that panel Granger causality runs positively from CSP to CFP, which means that changes in CSP produce lasting changes in CFP.

The findings of the paper would guide strategists to build fit for purpose corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies in their firms and establish a continuous investment in CSR activities in the long run rather than harshly investing in CSR activities in the short run.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one to address heterogeneity in long-run Granger causality tests to estimate the relationship between CSP and CFP.