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The degree of responsiveness of fiscal and monetary policy mechanisms that promote growth and development in Sierra Leone is the subject of this article.

This article uses both the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model presented by Hashem and Yongcheol (1998) and the Non-Linear Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model by Shin et al. (2014) to analyze annual time-series data in evaluating the asymmetric effect of real gross domestic product (RGDP), inflation, government expenditure and money supply using annual time-series data for 40 observations over the period 1980–2019.

The augmented Dickey–Fuller unit root test shows that money supply, government spending and consumer price index are integrated at first difference I (1), while RGDP is stationary at level I (0). The results of the NARDL cointegration test indicate that the variables are cointegrated. The study shows that government expenditure is a positive function of both positive and negative changes. Hence, both positive and negative cumulative sum government expenditures improve economic growth but show a relative weak asymmetric effect with the regressand. This study also reveals that inflation is a negative function of both positive and negative changes with asymmetric effect with the dependent variable. This study shows that the positive change of money supply is statistically insignificant in boosting economic growth, while the negative change positively improves economic growth. Conclusively, this article shows that fiscal policy has a greater and more responsive than monetary policy in promoting growth and development in Sierra Leone. The result of the error correction term of the NARDL model shows a high spend of adjustment of 135% from any disequilibrium of GDP imbalance in the economy.

To address the problem of fiscal dominance in Sierra Leone, this study recommends that fiscal and monetary policies should be coordinated simultaneously and to an appropriate extent to achieve the desired outcome in growth and development.

This study aims to examine the symmetric and asymmetric impact of external debt on inflation in Sudan from 1970 to 2020 within a multivariate framework by including money supply and the nominal effective exchange rate as additional inflation determinants.

The authors utilize an Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to examine the symmetric impact of external debt on inflation, while the asymmetric impact is examined using a Nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) model. The existence of a long-run relationship between inflation and external debt is tested using the bounds-testing approach to cointegration, and a vector error-correction model is estimated to determine the short parameters of equilibrium dynamics.

The linear ARDL model results show that external debt has no statistically significant impact on inflation in the long run. On the contrary, the results of the NARDL model show that positive and negative external debt shocks statistically affect inflation in the long run. The estimated long-run elasticity coefficients of the linear and nonlinear ARDL models reveal that the domestic money supply has a statistically significant positive impact on inflation. In contrast, the nominal effective exchange rate has a statistically significant negative impact on inflation.

The reliance on symmetric analysis may not be sufficient to uncover the existence of a linkage between external debt and inflation. Proper external debt management is crucial to control inflation rates in Sudan.

To date, no empirical study has assessed the external debt-inflation nexus and its potential asymmetry in Sudan, and the current study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

This study aims to examine the asymmetric effects of average temperature (TP) and rainfall (RF) on the Moroccan food security, measured by the food production index (FPI), using annual data from 1961 to 2020.

The study uses the Climate Change and Food Security Framework (CCFS) developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and employs the nonlinear auto-regressive distributed lag (NARDL) model and various econometric techniques to show the effects of climate variability in the short and long-term. It also examines if the impacts on Moroccan food security are asymmetric by analyzing the positive and negative partial sums of mean temperature and rainfall.

The study shows that RF has a long-term relationship with FPI, with increased RF leading to increased FPI and decreased RF leading to decreased FPI. FPI responds more strongly and persistently to a positive shock in RF than to an adverse shock. The study also identifies an asymmetric relationship between FPI and RF, with increased TP enhancing food output in the long run and a decrease reducing food production in the long run.

The current study could have some limitations. For instance, there are several other non-climate factors that might potentially impact food security. In particular, CO2 emissions which from the literature is a key variable that represent climate change impact on food security, was not included. The present research has not included those factors mainly because adding more variables to the model reduces the degree of freedom available to estimate the parameters, resulting in inaccurate results.

This paper contributes to the food security literature by utilizing the latest asymmetry methodology to decompose climate changes into their positive and negative trends and examining the contrasting impacts food production.

Over the years, India has witnessed irregular FDI inflows. Therefore, this study aims to explore the asymmetric impact of per capita income, final consumption expenditure, globalization index and exchange rate on FDI inflows in India.

Using the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag bounds framework and unknown structural break, the study investigates the impacts of selected macroeconomic variables in driving FDI inflows in India during the study period (1979-2016).

The outcomes of the study confirm the asymmetric relationship between FDI inflows and its determinants during the study period. The results have confirmed that the improvement in per capita income, private consumption expenditure, globalization index and currency value appreciation play a crucial role in increasing FDI inflows in India. In contrast, the downside movements in the volume of consumption expenditure, globalization index and depreciation of the currency value in relation to the trade partners result in reducing the volume of FDI inflows in the long run.

For determining FDI inflows, previous studies have considered the overall impact of its potential determinants, which may provide partial information about the phenomenon. The adopted nonlinear approach highlights that both the types of fluctuations (i.e. upside and downside) in the independent variables may affect FDI inflows differently and substantially. The nonlinear association between FDI and selected determinants may be vital in formulating a long-term policy.

The purpose of this study is to examine the accuracy of combined models with the individual models in terms of forecasting Euro against US dollar during COVID-19 era. During COVID, the euro shows sharp fluctuation in upward and downward trend; therefore, this study is keen to find out the best-fitted model which forecasts more accurately during the pandemic.

The descriptive design has been adopted in this research. The three univariate models, i.e. autoregressive integrated moving averages (ARIMA), Naïve, exponential smoothing (ES) model, and one multivariate model, i.e. nonlinear autoregressive distributive lags (NARDL), are selected to forecast the exchange rate of Euro against the US dollar during the COVID. The above models are combined via equal weights and var-cor methods to find out the accuracy of forecasting as Poon and Granger (2003) showed that combined models can forecast better than individual models.

NARDL outperforms all remaining individual models, i.e. ARIMA, Naïve and ES. By applying a combination of different models via different techniques, the combination of NARDL and Naïve models outperforms all combination of models by scoring the least mean absolute percentage error value, i.e. 1.588. The combined forecasting of NARDL and Naïve techniques under var-cor method also outperforms the forecasting accuracy of individual models other than NARDL. It means the euro exchange rate against the US dollar which is dependent upon the macroeconomic fundamentals and recent observations of the time series.

The findings could help the FOREX market, hedgers, traders, businessmen, policymakers, economists, financial managers, etc., to minimize the risk indulged in global trade. It also helps to produce more accurate results in different financial models, i.e. capital asset pricing model and arbitrage pricing theory, because their findings may not be useful if exchange rate fluctuations do not trace effectively.

The NARDL models have been applied previously in different time series and only limited to the asymmetric or symmetric relationships. This study is using it for the forecasting exchange rate which is almost abandoned in earlier literature. Furthermore, this study combined the NARDL with univariate models to produce the accuracy which itself is a novelty. Moreover, the findings help to enhance the effectiveness of different financial theories as well.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the short-run and long-run asymmetric effects of fiscal policy, namely government spending on economic growth over the sample period 2004Q2 up to 2018Q1 for the South African economy.

Nonlinear autoregressive distributive lag model is used to examine the short-run and long-run asymmetric effects of government spending on economic growth.

The results exhibit the negative change effect of government spending is found to be greater than the positive change effect of government spending on economic growth. Real effective exchange rate is found to have a positive and significant effect on economic growth both in the short run and long run. Whereas, inflation rate affects economic growth negatively and significantly in the short run and long run.

Previous empirical studies on the effect of fiscal policy on growth, at least for South Africa, consider only the asymmetric short-run effect while this paper extends the literature by incorporating asymmetries into the long-run effect. It provides a detailed analysis to the recent controversies on the effects of fiscal policy on growth.

This study explores the response of consumer confidence in policy uncertainty in the Japanese context. The study also considers the dynamism of stock market behavior and financial stress and its impact on consumer confidence, which has remained unaddressed in the literature. The role of these control variables has important implications for policy discussions, particularly when other countries can learn from Japanese experiences.

The nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model postulated by Shin et al. (2014) was used for studying the asymmetric response of consumer confidence to policy uncertainty. This method has improved estimates compared to traditional linear cointegration methods.

The findings confirm the asymmetric impact of policy uncertainty on the consumer confidence index in Japan. The impact of the rise in policy uncertainty is greater than that of a fall in asymmetry on consumer confidence in Japan. Furthermore, the Wald test confirmed asymmetric behavior.

The contribution of this study is threefold. First, this study contributes to the extant literature by analyzing the asymmetric response of consumer confidence to policy uncertainty, controlling for both the financial stress and stock price indices. Second, to test the robustness of the exercise, the study utilized different frequencies of observations. Third, this study is the first to utilize the concept of Arbatli et al. (2017) to formulate a combined index of uncertainty based on economic policy uncertainty index, along with uncertainty indices such as fiscal, monetary, trade and exchange rate policies to study the overall impact of policy uncertainty.

This study examines the influence of the global geopolitical risk (GPR) on the relationship between oil prices and domestic food prices under the augmented Phillips curve framework.

Using monthly data on Nigeria from January 1995 to December 2021, the authors accommodate symmetry and asymmetry by adopting the linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag, linear and nonlinear Granger causality tests.

The study establishes the positive and significant effects of both oil prices and GPR on food prices in the long and short run, though with a small magnitude in the short run. The asymmetric model shows that, while oil price shocks (positive and negative) exert a positive influence on food prices in the long-run, the effects of oil price shocks differ when accounting for GPR in the short-run. The coefficients of the interactive term, being the moderator of GPR between oil-food prices, are positively significant across models, suggesting that they jointly influence food prices when assuming linearity. The nonlinear model shows that the positive and negative components of interactive terms exert a positively significant influence on food prices, even though food prices tend to be more reactive to positive oil price shocks. The robustness checks show a unidirectional causal flow from oil prices and GPR to food prices under the linear and nonlinear models.

The authors examine the moderating effect of the newly developed global GPR index of Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) on the oil–food inflation relationship in Nigeria by applying the symmetric and asymmetric approaches.

The impact of debt on economic growth has attracted immense economic research necessitated by ballooning public debt stock among countries and most of the literature presume a symmetric relationship between debt and economic growth. However, this study contemplates an asymmetric relationship and thus relies on annual series from 1970 to 2019 to examine the asymmetric effects of public debt on economic growth in Ghana.

The nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) bounds approach was employed. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth is the dependent variable while public debt and other control variables each decomposed into their positive and negative shocks constitute the independent variables.

The results reveal that a positive shock to public debt insignificantly impacts the growth of the economy in the short and long runs. Also, a negative shock to public debt exerts significant short-run negative and insignificant long-run positive effects on the growth of the economy. The divergence in the short- and long-run effects on growth of a negative shock to public debt and the general insignificant effects of a positive shock to the same is a glitch that is attributed to overcapitalized loans and poor utilization of credit facilities.

The study recommends “inter alia” that the government of Ghana strengthens the short to medium-term debt management strategies achievable through the enforcement of the Public Financial Management Act (PFMA) Act-921 and the Public Procurement Act (PPA) Act-914 to deal with any adverse effects of debt on the growth of the economy.

The novelty of the current study lies not only in the fact that it captures recent public debt dynamics at a time Ghana faces extreme fiscal constraints and escalating cost of debt servicing but it also does so in an asymmetric environment which is unprecedented an assumption in the analysis of Ghana's public debt–economic growth nexus.

This paper aims to scrutinize the asymmetric interactions between current account deficit and gross fiscal deficit in case of a growing and dynamically integrated economy, namely, India featured with high inequality and liquidity constraints. Two additional variables, trade-openness and output growth, are also incorporated into the analysis to assess their likely impact on the current account balance.

The study uses a recently developed non-linear autoregressive distributed lag model given by Shin et al. (2014) in its empirical examination. In addition, non-linear cumulative dynamic multipliers are used to understand the route between disequilibrium position of short-run and subsequent long-run equilibrium of the system.

The study confirms the long-run co-movements of current account deficit and gross fiscal deficit and therefore refutes the Ricardian Equivalence proposition and validates the twin-deficit hypothesis. But instead of a linear relationship of the kind examined in the previous studies, the two variables share asymmetric linkages – both in the short run and in the long run. The asymmetry indicates that positive changes are more influential than their negative counterparts in the short run, whereas in the long run, only the positive changes are found to alter the external balance statistically. The asymmetric impact of fiscal deficits on the current account balance of a country may arise due to its asymmetric impact on aggregate demand through consumption inflexibility (ratchet effect) and the existence of liquidity constraints. The other control variables used in the study are also found to have cointegration with the current account deficit, but the relationship is symmetrical in the long run, even though it is asymmetrical in the short run. The study finally uses the asymmetric cumulative dynamic multipliers to examine the route of asymmetries and adjustments over the course of time. The dynamic multipliers also confirm the results documented in the earlier part and therefore demonstrate their robustness.

The asymmetric results obtained in the study provide strong grounds to devise the policies adaptive to changing arenas in domestic and external sectors. Output growth, export promotion and import substitution, increasing integration and fiscal austerity are seen as helpful in achieving a desired (and growth conducive) external balance together with macroeconomic stability. The need for a prudent fiscal policy and avoidance of profligacy is indicated based on the asymmetric results to ward off any unfavorable impact of fiscal deficits on external account. To conduct a sound fiscal policy, the government needs to cut down unproductive consumption expenditure, raise tax revenues and should pay attention to distribution and trickle-down effects to avoid the adversity of high inequality and liquidity constraints in the economy. Moreover, to ameliorate the current account balance, policies aimed at increasing the real competitiveness through control of domestic price fluctuations and improvement in the quality of tradable goods and services (such as productive investments and technological advancements) should be adopted.

Work reported in the present paper is motivated by the fact that there is no study conducted so far in the Indian context which has analyzed the two deficits in a nonlinear framework. The authors have used a well-articulated nonlinear asymmetric technique to examine the relationship between two deficits when asymmetry is incorporated. This paper will, therefore, enrich the existing literature along the lines of asymmetric linkages. Moreover, the traverse of asymmetries and adjustments over the course of time highlights the inherent dynamism of the relationship.