Deconstructing the Impact of Entrepreneurship on Income Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa Countries

The study examines the impacts of entrepreneurship on income inequality in a panel of 29 Sub-Saharan African countries spanning from 2004 to 2020. The paper employs a dynamic heterogeneous panel approach to differentiate between long-run and short-run impacts of entrepreneurship on income inequality. The findings establish a robust and direct nexus between entrepreneurial activities and income disparity. The results of the two entrepreneurial indicators are stable. Besides, the coefficient of the human capital is positive in the regression and statistically significant at a 5 percent significance level. The proxies for macroeconomic factors exhibit diverse signs and impact, which suggest a policy stimulus aimed at refining macroeconomic situations and also ignite prospects for households to increase their incomes

Does Financial Inclusion Moderate CO2 Emissions in Sub-Saharan Africa? Evidence From Panel Data Analysis

The threat posed by climate change has become a reality in the public sphere. This research looks at how financial inclusion affects carbon dioxide emissions in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries from 2004 to 2017. The panel autoregressive distributed lag and panel granger causality approaches are used to determine if financial inclusion reduces CO2 emissions in Sub-Saharan African countries. The PARDL results demonstrated that, over time, financial inclusion, GDP per capita, industrialization, and trade openness have a substantial beneficial influence on carbon emissions in SSA countries. The result suggests that these considered variables contribute significantly to CO2 emissions while urbanization and energy intensity reduce CO2 emissions in SSA. Financial inclusion and other control variables have no significant impacts on carbon emission in SSA in the short run. The findings of the granger causality test further confirm the direction of causality, revealing that financial inclusion, GDP per capita, industrialization, energy intensity, and trade openness, granger cause carbon emission in SSA countries. Meanwhile, carbon emission does not granger cause any of the considered factors. The study concludes that financial inclusion increases carbon emission in SSA countries, given the poor state of financial inclusion. Our findings advocate for a policy framework that would focus efforts on connecting financial inclusion measures with environmental legislation across SSA nations

Modelling the nexus between income inequality and shadow economy in Nigeria

Purpose — This paper aims to examine the relationship between the shadow economy and income inequality in Nigeria.Method — The paper employed Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS), and Granger causality. This methodology is used to avoid endogeneity and heterogeneity in the model. This paper gauged income inequality using two diverse indicators of the Gini coefficient: the Gini index in proportion to household disposable income and the Gini index in proportion to household market income. In accordance with the literature, our empirical analysis draws on data from the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID), the World Bank, World Development Indicators, and the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) for Nigeria from 1991 to 2018.Result — The findings of ARDL and FMOLS suggested a positive relationship between income inequality and the shadow economy, based on both measures of income inequality. In the short term, however, the shadow economy and income inequality are negatively correlated. Furthermore, we discovered a one-way causal relationship exists in Nigeria between the shadow economy, household disposable income, institutional democracy, household market income, and corruption control (CCI).Recommendation — Shadow economy has been regarded as an avenue to create job opportunities and raise poverty-income levels. It is critical that, for the shadow economy to reduce income inequality in Nigeria, policymakers should develop much better policies aimed at addressing income inequality.Contribution — In order to understand the relationship between income inequality and shadow economy activities in Nigeria, this study employed three methodologies, namely: Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL), Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS), and Granger Causality. The result offers reliable recommendations for pro-poor interventions that aim to limit the growth of informality via redistributing incomes.

Exploring the Interaction of Trade Openness, Income Inequality, and Poverty in Nigeria

The literature on the nexus between trade openness, income inequality and poverty appears conspicuously and of diverse outcomes. Perhaps, the mixed findings may be attributed to the methodology and economic structure of the country in view. The current study examines the trade openness on income inequality and poverty in Nigeria between 1981 and 2019 using Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) methodology. Our findings show that trade openness had different effects on inequality and poverty in Nigeria in the short and long run. While its relationship with inequality is a short-run phenomenon, it had a long-run relationship with poverty. Overall, trade openness had a declining effect on inequality and poverty. In the former, its impact was not statistically significant. However, the gains of trade openness on inequality and poverty were reversed when inequality influenced trade openness. In essence, with the influence of inequality, trade openness had an increasing effect on poverty. As a result, this study makes several recommendations to policymakers. To begin, a policy framework must be established to ensure that Nigerian trade is integrated with the rest of the world. Evidence from this study has suggested that policies such as restricting trade through border closures must not feature as a policy option as long as one of the goals of the economy is poverty reduction and reduction in inequality