Nkechinyere Rose Uwajumogu

Despite receiving a significant amount of foreign aid, the economies of the Sub‐Saharan African (SSA) countries are characterized by a high unemployment rate, poor health status, and high levels of poverty. Based on the above background, this study examined the impact of foreign aid on the three pillars of sustainable development (social, economic, and environmental). The influence of colonial power on the effectiveness of foreign aid was also considered. The study covered 36 SSA countries for the period 2006–2021 and utilized the two‐step system GMM for the analysis. The study found that foreign aid has a significant positive impact on social and environmental sustainability, but a significant negative effect on economic sustainability. It indicates the need for increased aid flow to the social and environmental sectors. The study also found that the United Kingdom and other colonial powers have a significant positive influence on the foreign aid‐sustainable development nexus, while France as a colonial power exhibited a negative influence. It implies that France's aid to SSA is not for a genuine purpose. The study recommends policies that will attract more foreign aid to the social and environmental sectors, as well as mandatory scrutiny of all aid agencies to identify genuine ones.

We assessed the differential effects of social expenditures on males and females by establishing the impact of public expenditures on education and health on gender parity in primary and secondary enrollment and on gender parity in life expectancy for Nigeria given age dependency ratio, annual population growth rate, and GDP per capita growth rate. We found that increased social spending on health and education increased female education enrollment which was hitherto lower than male enrollment. Again, increased social expenditure on health and education improved male life expectancy which was hitherto lower than female life expectancy. We established the importance of increased social expenditure on health and education; gender budgeting and gender-sensitive budgets; and implementation of inclusive growth policies in engendering gender parity in Nigeria.

Investigating the impacts of globalization on vulnerable employment with a focus on sub‐Saharan African (SSA) women's job experience is in line with efforts towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 8. We examined the impacts of social, economic, and political globalization, as well as de facto and de jure conditions, in explaining the proportion of women working in vulnerable jobs in SSA. Using the instrumental variable generalized method of moment approach with panel data from 37 SSA countries for the period 2000–2016, we found de facto/de jure globalization conditions to have positive/negative impacts on the proportion of women in vulnerable employment in SSA. Furthermore, estimates from disaggregated globalization indices indicate that both economic de facto and social de facto globalization conditions had negative impacts whereas political globalization had positive impacts on our subject matter. Developing inclusive socioeconomic policies that promote women's welfare in SSA would therefore necessitate political reforms as well as policies that support improvements in women's economic and social conditions.

Impact of Crime Control and Youth Empowerment: A Socio-Economic Discourse and Technological Implication

When previous studies relate innovation behaviours to firm heterogeneity, they consider mainly product and process innovations. In this paper, we consider a wider range of types of innovation that firms could combine to form different innovation strategies. Using the multivariate probit model, we analyze the selection of heterogeneous firms into different innovation strategies. This model allows the joint modelling of the correlated innovation choices and, in addition, dispels any judgemental prescription of firms’ innovation behaviours. In the work, we contribute to the debate on the complementarity/substitutability relationships between types of innovation. Our results show that different characteristics of the firm influence the innovation strategies of the firm and that firms prefer to complement innovations rather than substitute them, but heterogeneities were observed. We recommend the inclusion of all innovation types available to the firm in the analysis of firms’ innovation behaviours in order to obtain a complete description. Furthermore, as our sample covers 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, we are the first to provide a snapshot of innovation behaviours of firms operating in Africa and, in addition, show that there are no inter-country differences in innovation tendencies of firms in the region.