Xtra Supervisors
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- Cross Border Spillovers, Macroeconomic Convergence and Economic growth in West Africa
In the light of the current events happening in West Africa, the Boko
Haram scourge, the oil sector development and the political upheavals in
West African countries, there is the need to investigate how these
events spill from one country to another and how they affect the
socio-political and economic atmosphere in each nation and the goal of
convergence necessary for the continued survival of the ECOWAS.
- Stock Exchange Dynamics, Investor Behaviour and Macroeconomic Stability
The subprime financial crisis that emanated from the US and hit most of the economies of the world had its impact reflected in the stock market of the affected countries. Investors became bullish, there was a shortage of credit and capital flight resulted in sustained depreciation of the exchange rate and speculative attacks.
- Federal Systems, Internal Conflict and Economic Growth
Countries operating federal systems like Nigeria, tend to be centralized and this raises the tendency for ethnic-centrism and marginalization and the resulting effect of this is civil conflict. On the basis of this one could hypothesize that conflicts are the result of centralization and that decentralization via the devolution of powers could stem the tide of incessant conflicts.
- Growth, Unemployment and Poverty
Nigeria, early this year, was labelled the richest country in Africa after the rebasing of its real GDP. Surprising enough Nigeria still ranks high on the poverty headcount index (with a value of 84.5% in 2010) and has an estimated youth unemployment rate of 50%. It is hence pertinent to explain the kind of growth that would make a country the richest in Africa and yet record high levels of poverty and unemployment.
- Domestic Productive Capacity, International Trade and Macroeconomic Vulnerability/Resilience
Foreign direct investment is expected to be one of the major drives of economic growth in Nigeria but this comes at the cost of being exposed to dangerous shocks from the global economic community. While policy makers may suggest the development of a sovereign wealth fund to make the country resilient to such shocks the Nigerian economy is still vulnerable to such shocks as its domestic productive capacity is poor as witnessed by high levels of unemployment given a youthful population and large infrastructural deficits.
