Money Supply Movement and Food Inflation in Nigeria

Among the major macroeconomic objectives of any nation is to ensure higher economic growth without significant and persistent upward trend in the general price level. No wonder monetary authorities do emphasis low inflation-output growth. In Nigeria, all efforts of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to achieve single digits inflation over the years have been abortive. Against this background, this paper examines the impact of money supply on food inflation in Nigeria using monthly data between 1996:01 and 2021:12. The augmented Dickey-Fuller test of unit root is to check the stationary of money supply growth and food inflation. Thereafter, an autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) model is specified in order to capture both contemporaneous and effects of money supply on food inflation and the model is estimated using the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation technique. The results reveal that money supply has contemporaneous effect on food inflation. No evidence of lagged effect is found. It is therefore concluded that controlling the growth in money supply is an effective measure to control food inflation

Modelling the Global Prevalence of COVID-19: An Econometric Approach

Nearly all economies of the world suffered from the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic emanating from Wuhan City of China to the rest of the world. A number of studies have been conducted to investigate the drivers of the spread of the viral infection. We differ from existing studies by employing a cross-sectional quantile regression approach to uncover socio-economic conditions that are instrumental in the spread of COVID-19 in Africa, Asia, America and Europe. Across the continents, we observed that life expectancy, the size of the aged population and spending on the health sector have significant impacts on the spread of COVID-19. We also noted the specific roles of out-of-pocket spending, net migration and tourism attraction for Africa, America and Europe, respectively, in driving the viral spread. We therefore draw policy implications in terms of the need for improved spending on health sector across continents and the need to intensify health checks for travelers and immigrants, and also the need to emphasize regular check-ups for all individuals across continents since current realities have shown that no age-group is spared of contracting the viral infection