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Unemployment is one of the major challenges facing most countries, including Africa as a continent. Seeking how to reduce unemployment, debt, inflation and increase gross domestic product (GDP), foreign direct investment (FDI) and gross capital formation in the continent has been an agenda of governments, policy makers and economists to. This study examines the relationship between economic growth, inflation, debt, FDI, gross capital formation, labor force, population and unemployment in Africa.

An updated panel dataset of 29 African countries was selected from different regions from 1991 to 2019. These countries were selected based on their unemployment, population growth and inflation rates. The Pesaran cross-sectional dependence and panel unit root test (the Dickey–Fuller cross-sectional supplemented and the Im-Pesaran-Shin cross-sectional) were applied. Further, the panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model (Bounds test) and pooled mean group (PMG) estimator were utilized in this work.

This shows that economic growth, debt, labor force and population have a positive relationship with unemployment in the long run. Therefore, an increase in these variables generates an increase in the selected African countries' unemployment growth. In contrast, inflation, FDI and gross capital formation have a negative relationship with unemployment in the long run, which implies that an increase in these variables reduces unemployment in the selected African countries.

This study has potential limitations because some data from the countries are not up to date and some years are missing from the data.

This study contributes to understanding unemployment and Okun's law in the African economy. This study shows that an increase in economic growth leads to a rise in unemployment, while an increase in inflation leads to a decrease in unemployment.

This paper provides an insight into the major factors that increase and reduces unemployment for government and policy marker to take the adequate measure.

Despite the huge financial resources associated with oil, Nigeria has consistently recorded poor growth performance. Therefore, this study aims to examine how corruption and oil rent influence Nigeria’s economic performance during the 1996–2021 period.

Various estimation techniques were used. These include the bootstrap autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds-testing, dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), the fully modified OLS (FMOLS) and the canonical cointegration regression (CCR) estimators and the Toda–Yamamoto causality.

The bounds testing results provide evidence of a cointegrating relationship between the variables. In addition, the results of the ARDL, DOLS, CCR and FMOLS estimators demonstrate that oil rent and corruption have a significant positive impact on growth. Further, the results indicate that human capital and financial development enhance economic growth, whereas domestic investment and unemployment rates slow down long-term growth. Additionally, the causality test results illustrate the presence of a one-way causality from oil rent to economic growth and a bi-directional causal relationship between corruption and economic growth.

Existing studies focused on the effects of either oil rent or corruption on growth in Nigeria. Little attention has been paid to the exploration of how the rent from oil and the pervasiveness of corruption contribute to the performance of the Nigerian economy. Based on the outcome of this study, strategies and policies geared towards reducing oil dependence and the pervasiveness of corruption, enhancing human capital and financial development and reducing unemployment are recommended.

This paper analyzes real and welfare effects of a permanent change in inflation rate, focusing on macroprudential policy’ role and its interaction with monetary policy.

While investigating disinflation costs, the authors simulate a medium-scale dynamic general equilibrium model with borrowing constraints, credit frictions and macroprudential authority.

Providing discussions on different policy scenarios in a context where still it is expected high inflation, there are three key contributions. First, when macroprudential authority actively operates to improve financial stability, losses caused by disinflation are limited. Second, a Taylor rule directly responding to financial variables might entail a trade-off between price and financial stability objectives, by increasing disinflation costs. Third, disinflation is welfare improving for savers, while costly for borrowers and banks. Indeed, while savers benefit from policies reducing price stickiness distortion, borrowers are worried about credit frictions, coming from collateral constraint.

The paper suggests threefold policy implications: the macroprudential authority should actively intervene during a disinflation process to minimize costs and financial instability deriving from it; policymakers should implement a disinflationary policy stabilizing also output; the central bank and the macroprudential regulator should pursue financial and price stability goals, separately.

This paper is the first attempt to study effects of a permanent inflation target reduction in focusing on the macroprudential policy’ role.

This paper is an attempt to re-examine the validity of the Twin Deficit Hypothesis in the Indian economy, which is characterised by mounting inequality and liquidity constraints. The authors augment the econometric analysis with two important mediating variables, exchange rate and trade openness, to analyse their impact on current account deficit.

The authors have used a ground-breaking asymmetric cointegration technique proposed by Shin et al. (2014) to investigate the short-run and long-run asymmetric nexus between gross fiscal deficit and current account deficit. In addition, the study has used asymmetric dynamic multipliers to see the dynamics of nonlinear adjustment from disequilibrium in the short run to equilibrium in the long run. The study has also used generalised impulse response functions to check the robustness of our cointegration results.

Using annual time series data from 1970 to 2018, the empirical exercise validates the presence of asymmetries in the Twin Deficit Hypothesis for the Indian economy. This study's robust findings demonstrate that the two deficits are asymmetrically related in the long run. The authors also found that exchange rate asymmetrically affects current account deficit thus validating the asymmetric J-curve phenomenon. From the causality analysis, the authors infer that there is a weak unidirectional causality running from fiscal deficit to current account deficit.

Fiscal deficit may cause current account deficit via changes in other macroeconomic variables that were not taken care of in this study. Therefore, the estimation techniques used in the present study might suffer from the issue of omitted-variable bias. Further research should include other macroeconomic variables where the twin deficit nexus is also influenced by other relevant variables. This will help in disentangling the indirect transmissions by which fiscal deficit translates into current account deficit.

The results from our econometric exercise strongly suggest that the twin deficits are asymmetrically related. From a policy perspective, the asymmetric twin deficit nexus offers strong policy implications for the development of policies that are flexible enough to respond to shifts in internal and external sector dynamics. While framing the mechanism of fiscal prudence, policymakers in emerging countries like India must take into account the regime-changing behaviour of twin deficits.

The present paper is a significant contribution to the existing body of literature by being the first study in India which has analysed the Twin Deficits phenomenon in a nonlinear framework with the incorporation of asymmetric exchange rate dynamics in the model.