Climate change and agricultural development in West Africa: Role of renewable energy and trade openness

This paper examines the macro-economic and bank-specific factors affecting non-performing loans in commercial banks. Using 47 listed commercial banks from six countries, namely 19 banks from Nigeria, 14 banks from Benin, 3 banks from Burkina Faso, 3 banks from Gambia, 3 banks from Guinea, and 5 banks from Liberia for the period 2008 to 2019, fixed and random effect model was used. The Hausman test favored the selection of fixed effect model, and it was found from the estimation that the liquidity ratio, capital adequacy ratio and inflation rate significantly affect non-performing loans. As a result, it is advised that banks depend not only on their ability to achieve the capital adequacy ratio, but also guarantee that loans are thoroughly scrutinized before being issued to beneficiaries. Bank managers should guarantee that banking staff is not simply awarding loans to secure their jobs by accumulating deposits from consumers at the price of the bank’s long-term stake. In addition, the economies of West Africa should keep their inflation rates low so that repayment of loans on time is cheap and realistic.

Acknowledgment
I would like to appreciate Fezile Nonjabulo Gcwabaza for love and support throughout this research project.

The main goal of the article is to analyze the role and influence of economic freedom on macroeconomic stability. For this purpose, the authors used the integrated index of economic freedom, calculated by the Heritage Foundation and Democracy Index. It is noted that this index indicator was calculated by the experts from the World Bank using the index of voice and accountability. In the paper, the authors used the multinational panel dataset for 11 countries of the EU for the purpose of checking the correlation between economic freedom, democracy and macroeconomic stability. It should be highlighted that the abovementioned 11 countries are related by the fluctuation of economic growth during the transformation process (1996–2016) from communist party to the democracy and political pluralism. In addition, the authors proposed to add the indicators of political stability and trade openness, which allowed to take into account implementation of flexible macroeconomic instruments, including monetary policy, which towards increasing the economic growth, employment and financial development of the countries. The findings are directed received using the regression equation with fixed and random effects showed the high level of correspondence of the model used with the original observations. Despite the chosen approach to estimate the macroeconomic stability, the findings showed that there is a positive and statistically significant impact of economic freedom and democracy on macroeconomic stability.

This study aims to provide insight on the nexus between innovation, economic growth and CO2 emissions. In order to achieve this, data on potential factors such as innovation, environmental taxes, research and development (R&D) spending, electricity production, population size, high-technology exports and prices of photovoltaic systems are collected for the sample of the leading innovative countries over the period from 1990 to 2014. Based on a cointegrated panel methodology and a vector error correction model, the long-run, as well as the short-run dynamics of all possible combinations between the variables under study, are estimated. The results reveal that except for China, economic growth is mainly driven by electricity production, population size, CO2 emissions and R&D spending. However, innovation was found to have lesser effect on economic growth. In addition to that, the authors found evidence in favor of CO2 emissions being affected positively by population size and prices of photovoltaic systems and negatively by environmental taxes, high-technology exports, R&D spending and innovation. Moreover, on the contrary to population size, well-being is positively affected by CO2 emission and R&D spending.