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The economic costs of tobacco use are substantial particularly in developing countries. While much has been written on healthcare costs from tobacco use related diseases, little is known on the macro-economic impacts of tobacco-related productivity loss. The objective of the current research is to understand the macroeconomic burden of tobacco use in developing countries. Using World Bank's development indicators database for 44 low-and lower-middle-income countries, most of which are African, this paper assesses the relationship between tobacco consumption and economic growth. Specifically, using the fixed effect regression approach, we examined whether tobacco prevalence affects long-run growth rate in the real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We adopted an empirical framework from the growth literature by including the national tobacco prevalence rate as one of the determinants of long-run growth in the real GDP per capita. The tobacco prevalence rate varies across countries ranging from 5% in Ethiopia to almost 50% in Myanmar. The prevalence rate is much higher among males than females in almost all countries, with Myanmar males having above 70%. The regression results indicate the existence of a statistically significant negative relationship between the prevalence of tobacco and economic growth after controlling for other determinants of growth, including the initial level of GDP per capita, gross fixed capital formation, trade, resource revenues, institutional quality, a human capital indicator, and infrastructure capacity. A 1% increase in the total tobacco prevalence rate reduces the economic growth rate by almost 2%, all else equal. These findings are robust even after running separate models for male and female tobacco prevalence rates. The results on the other determinants of growth are consistent with the previous empirical studies on economic growth in the context of developing countries. The findings of this study provide additional support to the existing body of empirical economic research on the role of better health, as a form of human capital, in increasing economic output. Thus, actively targeting tobacco control interventions, both in and outside of the workplace, can likely improve workers' productivity and hence economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the primary policy issues over the years in the context of the Nigerian economy has been how to enhance the performance of the non-oil export sector of the economy in order to diversify the country's export base and contribute more to GDP (gross domestic product). Rather than a lack of policy initiatives, the noticeably abysmal performance of Nigerian non-oil exports has been increasingly attributed to poor policy implementation. However, the question of whether such poor implementation is due to the quality of institutional settings, particularly in a developing economy such as Nigeria, has been largely unexplored. To the best of our knowledge, none of the previous studies deemed it necessary to control for the role of institutional quality in the non-oil export-growth nexus from the perspective of the Nigerian economy. To bridge this important gap in the literature, we hypothesize that institutional qualities matter in the relationship between economic growth and non-oil exports. Motivated by a desire to diversify Nigeria's economy away from its reliance on oil exports, this study re-examines the export-led growth hypothesis from the standpoint of non-oil exports while accounting for the role of institutional qualities. We employ the ARDL estimation technique as the best econometric model for the study given its suitability for variables of mixed order of integration in terms of the series' stationarity. More so, the ARDL technique enables us to simultaneously capture both the short-run and long-run dynamics of the nexus. Empirically, we show results that suggest that improved institutional qualities have the potential to boost the positive effects of non-oil exports on economic growth. We also find that the extent to which institutional quality matters for enhancing the effects of non-oil exports on economic growth depends on the institutional quality indicators chosen. On the whole, we expand on the export-led growth hypothesis by considering the role of institutional characteristics and conclude that improving institutional qualities should be prioritized in the path to Nigerian economic diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa is a country that is open to trade, and this makes the study significant as economic institutions work better in such countries. The underperformance of South Africa's economy stems from the difficulties in achieving institutional change where state-owned companies such as Sasol benefit the most in the oil, gas and chemical industries. This is because SoEs are the main suppliers of natural gas sourced from Mozambique. This implies that Sasol's customers are the price takers, meaning that whatever the price of gas set by Sasol, it will be difficult for Sasol's customers to oppose it since there is no competition within the market. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with poor economic institutions struggle to grow their businesses due to property insecurity, barriers to market entry, and biased contract offering. The study employed the ARDL to determine the long-run relationship between economic institutions and economic growth, whilst the pairwise Granger causality test was used to determine the direction of the established cointegration. The study used annual time series data for the variables included in the model sourced from World Development Indicators (WDI), the global economy, and Transparency International for the period 1995 to 2020. The estimated ARDL model included the following variables; Gross Domestic Product Per Capita (GDPPC), Property Rights Index (PRI), Corruption Perception Index (CPI), Government Expenditure Per Capita (GOVEXPP), and Trade openness (TO). The study's findings indicate that PRI as a proxy of economic institutions promotes economic growth in South Africa. The results further show that all other variables also promote growth except CPI. The pairwise Granger Causality test indicates that there is a direct causality between economic institutions and economic growth. The economic policy implication in this regard is that South Africa's government should invest the majority of its public expenditure on human capital to improve the skills of unemployed youth, potentially increasing their employability. Consequently, better economic institutions could be implemented or created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workers' remittances represent up to 47 percent of gross domestic product in some Asian countries. Also, workers' remittances to the Asian region were estimated to reach $256 billion out of $483 billion received by developing countries. However, the growth effect of workers' remittance in Asia has, over the years, remained an open empirical question. To this end, this study examines the impact of workers' remittance and its interactive effects with financial development and institutional quality on economic growth. The study used a partial Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure, which enable us to examine whether the marginal effect of workers' remittances depends on the degree of financial development and institutional quality. It also used a Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator on panel dataset for a period of 1984-2010 from fifteen (15) remittance-receiving Asian countries. The results of this study shows that, workers' remittance impacts positively on economic growth in remittance-receiving Asian countries. But, the growth effect is higher in Asian countries with improved financial development but relatively weak institutions. According to the findings a percentage point increase in per capita workers' remittance leads to a long-run increase in per capita income by 0.103 percentage points. Moreover, the marginal effect of workers' remittance on economic growth rises with increase in the degree of financial development. But it declines with improvement in institutional environment. The partial derivative of economic growth with respect to workers' remittance at the mean level of financial development is 9.733. Similarly, the derivative evaluated at the minimum and maximum levels of financial development are found to be 1.355, and 32.087 respectively. The proportions of these derivatives at different levels of financial development showed that the marginal growth effect of workers' remittances rises with increase in the degree of financial development in remittance-receiving Asian countries. However, the partial derivative of economic growth with respect to workers' remittance at the mean level of institutional quality is - 12.068. But, the partial derivative computed at the maximum and minimum levels of institutional quality take the value of -15.945 and - 6.785 respectively. This suggests that the better institutional environment is in a country the lesser will be the growth impact of workers' remittance. Overall, the result suggests that workers' remittance and financial development work as complements in enhancing economic growth. However, the former and institutional quality act as substitutes in promoting economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current studies on the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis (EKC), which stipulates the association between economic growth and environmental pollution as an inverted U-shaped curve, appears to have had varied findings. Thus, the principal objective of the current research exploration was the examination of a conceivable association between carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) and economic growth in Sierra Leone, for the period, 2002-2015, and the endorsement of the EKC hypothesis relating to the Sierra Leone economy. This was significant because nearly all prior researches on CO2 and economic growth relationship in developing nations were on the EKC hypothesis, rather than the nexus between CO2 emissions and economic growth. The apposite research methodology was quantitative with time series data comprising 56 observations and 6 variables. Utilizing the autoregressive maximum likelihood [AR(2)] model, the results revealed the gross domestic product per capita, foreign direct investment, and renewable energy individually had significant effects on carbon dioxide pollution emissions. However, the AR(2) model showed no support for the EKC hypothesis in Sierra Leone. Moreover, applying the Phillips-Ouliaris cointegration model, the outputs specified a statistically significant long-run relationship between CO2 and, at least, one element of economic growth (Rho = -20.529, Tau = -3.907, p < .05). In addition, the error correction model (errorECM1) employed to examine the short-run departure from the long-run had the anticipated symbol, and was statistically significant (ßerrorECM1 = -.159, SE = .052, t = -3.07, p = .004), indicating a rapid correction progression to long-run equilibrium of about 15.9% annually. Nevertheless, both the long-and-short-run models showed no support for the EKC hypothesis in Sierra Leone, for the examination period. Obviously, the strong and positive effect of foreign direct invest on CO2 in the longrun and short-run models had a policy corollary because the effect seemed to insinuate a surge in foreign direct investment inflows concurrently enhanced CO2 pollution emissions in the country. The findings had significant applied and policy implications because of the suggestive necessity for foreign direct investment and energy policies to aim at less greenhouse effect production methods, to guarantee both environmental imperishability and the realization of sustainable economic growth objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the dynamic causal link between exports and economic growth using both linear and nonlinear Granger causality tests. We use annual South African data on real exports and real gross domestic product from 1911-2011. The linear Granger causality result shows no evidence of significant causality between exports and GDP. The relevant VAR is unstable, which undermines our confidence in the causality result identified by the linear Granger causality test. Accordingly we turn to the nonlinear methods to evaluate Granger causality between exports and GDP. First, we use Hiemstra and Jones (1994) nonlinear Granger causality test and find a unidirectional causality from GDP to exports. However, using a more powerful and less biased nonlinear test, the Diks and Panchenko (2006) test, we find evidence of significant bi-directional causality. These results highlight the risk of misleading conclusions based on the standard linear Granger causality tests which neither accounts for structural breaks nor uncover nonlinearities in the dynamic relationship between exports and GDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]