Cluster Development in a Transforming Economy: The Case of Motorcycle Spare Parts Firms in Nnewi, Anambra State of Nigeria

This paper examined the impact of cluster development in Nnewi, Anambra State of Nigeria. The estimated parsimonious model revealed that capital and labour were significant determinants of sales made by the firms while the cluster dummy variable was insignificant. This insignificance of the cluster dummy variable implied that, in terms of total sales, there was no significant difference between firms in the cluster and firms outside the cluster. For the profit model, we found that capital, labour and the cluster dummy were significant at 1% level. Capital, labour and cluster dummy have a positive relationship with firm profit. The positive coefficient of the cluster dummy variable indicated that the profit of firms in the cluster was significantly higher than that of the firms outside the cluster by about ₦31,050. It was therefore concluded that cluster residency made a significant difference in firm profit and recommended that government should encourage cluster development to accelerate the transformation of the economy

Reassessing the Empirical Relationship between Health Expenditure, Governance and Economic Growth in Africa: Analysis of Nigerian Data

As an aspect of human capital, a positive association exists amongst health, productivity, and growth in output per capita. On the other hand, social infrastructure defined by the institution of governance has a direct effect on the environment upon which productive activities take place to determine outcomes. Nigeria like most African countries is bedevilled by the high prevalence of inadequate health financing and poor governance. Health financing for Nigeria consistently has fallen short of the AU health funding commitment of 15% of annual budgetary allocation to the health sector. Secondly, poor governance conditions available resources and shape the state of infrastructure, particularly health infrastructure and socioeconomic conditions. In turn, this determines individuals’ level of exposure to health risks and their capacity to actively contribute to productive activity for growth stimulation and sustainability. Against this backdrop, this study added to the existing literature in the context of Nigeria, by theoretically applying the Solow augmented Mankiw-Romer-Weil structural model in the examination of the impact of government size and governance quality in the health sector, on economic growth. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was adopted in the estimation. Findings show that governance quality adversely affects growth and this reduces the capacity of health spending to stimulate growth by an almost equal margin. As a result, this study recommends legislative backing to the AU health funding commitment in Nigeria

Political Environment and the Use of Energy Resources in Nigeria

This study examines the dynamic relationship between political environment and the use of energy resources in Nigeria covering the period from 1978-2017 using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach. The results reveal that democracy has a significant long run and short run positive influence on energy consumption in Nigeria. However, the positive effect decreases significantly with an increase in the level of oil dependence in the short run. The results of this study in general support the view that high dependence of political democratic structures on oil wealth influences the positive effects of democracy in making public goods available in developing net oil-exporting economies. Economic diversification in Nigeria may therefore require formulating policies that will enhance access to clean energy sources in the economy