Remittance,Institutions and Investment Volatility Interactions: An Intercontinental Analysis

Generating massive investment for growth and development has been one of the main policy goals of most economies around the globe. Countries, most especially developing ones, are highly susceptible to investment volatility owing largely to the fragile nature of their economies as well as weaknesses in terms of dysfunctional institutions. Therefore, sound economic management suggests the need to better understand possible sources for mitigating the adverse effects of investment volatility. Remittances have been identified as important capital flows which do a good job of dousing macroeconomic volatilities. It is on this basis that the study sought to uncover the causal relationship between remittances and investment volatility via the intermediating role of institutions. Using a panel of 70 countries and the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator, three insightful outcomes come to the fore. First, remittances played countercyclical roles across the estimated regressions. Second, institutional quality had no significant role in mitigating investment volatility and lastly, the interactive terms of both remittances and institutions significantly mitigated the negative impacts of investment volatility with the exception of the political component of the institutional architecture. Policy suggestions are drawn based on our results.     

Children’s Work in Nigeria: Exploring the Implications of Gender, Urban–Rural Residence, and Household Socioeconomic Status

Child labor in developing countries continues to be a topic of policy and academic concern, particularly in Africa where there are more working children than in any other region. Scholarly attention has been drawn in part to gender, place of residence, and socioeconomic status as factors that shape the type of work that children perform and whether it impacts educational attainment. I explore these issues in the context of Nigeria through analysis of data from the 2004 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey EdData Survey. A series of logistic regression models of child labor confirm the existence of gender and, especially, socioeconomic disparities in children??s work. The data also indicate that girls and rural children face a double risk of working if they belong to poor households. A policy implication is that poverty alleviation programs??such as Mexico??s Oportunidades program (the erstwhile PROGRESA)??may help to reduce those forms of child labor that interfere with schooling. That this program has been found to more beneficial for girls suggests it may be particularly appropriate for Nigeria where gender disparities persist.     

Remittances and output growth volatility in developing countries: Does financial development dampen or magnify the effects?

The paper empirically investigated the relationship between remittance flows and output growth volatility for an extensive sample predominated by emerging