Mduduzi Biyase

This study investigates how ICT influences the relationship between green innovation and green growth in selected African economies. Despite the recognised importance of green innovation for sustainable development, its impact in Africa is constrained by weak innovation systems, limited digital infrastructure, and institutional inefficiencies. Using panel data for nine African countries from 2000 to 2022, the study employs fixed-effects and interaction-based heterogeneity models to assess the conditioning role of ICT. Green growth is measured using the Green Growth Index, while green innovation is proxied by environment-related technologies. ICT is captured through indicators such as internet usage, mobile subscriptions, and a composite index derived from Principal Component Analysis (PCA), offering a more comprehensive measure of digital development. The findings show that green innovation significantly promotes green growth, with ICT contributing both directly and indirectly. However, results reveal a nonlinear, interaction-based heterogeneity relationship: the positive effect of green innovation is stronger in low-ICT environments and weakens at higher ICT levels. This suggests structural heterogeneity rather than simple complementarity. Institutional quality and renewable energy support green growth, while financial development shows inconsistent effects. The study underscores the need for coordinated context-specific policies aligned with varying ICT development levels across Africa.

The present study focuses on the major research questions: What kind of relationship exists between green innovation and green growth in India? And how far are the structural as well as the financial factors helpful in empowering this relationship? The study investigates the connection between green innovation and green growth in India using annual time series data from the period 1990 to 2022, collected from multiple sources that include World Development Indicators, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for environment-related technologies, and globalization (LKOF) from the KOF Swiss Economic Institute. The Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach has been utilized to analyze short-run and long-run impacts, complemented by FMOLS, DOLS, and CCR estimators. The major findings confirm that green innovation, financial development, and income growth have a significant impact on green growth, but energy consumption and capital formation have a negative impact on green growth. The results demonstrate that a 1 percent rise in technological innovations promotes nearly 0.8 percent green growth. Further, the analysis also supports the positive effect on financial development (0.906) and per-capita income (4.518), but ICT expansion exerts a negative impact of (-0.399), implying the transitional environmental cost connected with digital expansion. The results offer actionable policy insights for India. To promote green growth, it is required to encourage green finance, facilitate the ICT infrastructure and green R & D ecosystem, foster renewable energy investments, and promote innovation-led strategies to achieve long-term environmental and economic resilience.

Across African countries, inclusive development remains limited by persistent inequalities in access to opportunities, services, and economic participation. This study examines the determinants of inclusive development using the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) for 41 countries between 2008 and 2020. Leveraging machine learning–based regularisation techniques, we systematically evaluate a broad set of 48 potential drivers, including economic structure, governance, globalization, energy, and social variables. The analysis identifies skills, governance quality, employment, health, and access to clean energy and digital technologies as the most robust predictors of inclusive development. These findings highlight the structural and institutional conditions most strongly associated with broad-based human development, offering evidence-based guidance for policies aimed at reducing exclusion and promoting equitable growth in Africa.

Climate shocks are intensifying across Southern Africa, yet little is known about how the experience of extreme weather, and the response to it, reshapes the institutional loyalties of rural communities governed jointly by state and traditional authority. Using an original two-wave survey of 299 residents of Hlokozi, a traditional-authority community in the Harry Gwala District of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (May and September 2025), this paper examines how climate shock exposure and the source of post-disaster relief relate to trust in thirteen state and non-state institutions. Three findings emerge. First, residents trust traditional and religious leaders substantially more than state institutions, with coercive and bureaucratic arms of the state trusted more than political ones. Second, receiving assistance from non-governmental organisations is associated with large and robust increases in trust across virtually all institutions, an association that survives wild-cluster bootstrap inference, whereas receiving government aid, the most common relief source after recent flooding, carries no trust premium whatsoever. Third, climate shock exposure is positively associated with trust in state institutions on average, but channels trust towards traditional leadership specifically among residents with strong community identity, consistent with an Ubuntu-based account of communal coping. The results suggest that disaster relief operates as an attribution problem: visible non-state delivery earns generalised trust dividends that routine state provision does not, with implications for the legitimacy consequences of climate adaptation policy in co-operative governance settings.

This study empirically investigates the impact of exchange rate volatility on foreign direct investment inflows to India from 1990 to 2023, addressing a crucial dimension of macroeconomic stability in emerging economies. Recognizing that currency fluctuations significantly influence multinational corporations’ investment decisions, understanding this impact is vital for effective economic policy. Utilizing annual time series data from the Reserve Bank of India and the World Bank, the study employs the Quantile Autoregressive Distributed Lag (QARDL) modeling framework to capture both short-run and long-run dynamics. Unlike conventional mean-based estimators, the QARDL framework captures heterogeneous effects across different points of the FDI distribution, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of how macroeconomic factors influence investment under varying economic conditions. The empirical results reveal significant asymmetries in the relationship between exchange rate fluctuations and FDI inflows. In the long run, exchange rate depreciation positively influences FDI inflows, particularly at the median and upper quantiles of the FDI distribution, suggesting that currency competitiveness becomes more important when investment inflows are already moderate or strong. In contrast, the exchange rate effect is statistically insignificant at lower quantiles, indicating that currency movements alone are insufficient to attract foreign investment when inflows are weak. These results offer valuable empirical insights for policymakers seeking to enhance macroeconomic resilience and promote long-term capital inflows in developing countries.

The global investment landscape presents challenges as subdued growth prospects, geopolitical tensions, and economic disintegration reshape international investment. Increasing tensions are making globalization more exorbitant and uncertain. Increasing trade barriers, intensified scrutiny of investments, and reputational risks are shaping foreign direct investment (FDI) strategies, prompting a shift in focus from efficiency to navigating geopolitical risks and opportunities. This research examines the convergence traits of FDI inflows among 179 nations, utilizing the Phillips and Sul club grouping method and the log t regression analysis covering the years from 1999 to 2022. Our research results denote a divergence in FDI inflow across the sample. However, the study identified three convergence clubs after applying the club clustering technique. The regional analysis results reveal provisional convergence across the regions—Latin America, Africa, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. Discoveries by the ordered logit and probit models emphasized the crucial role of institutional governance on club membership in FDI convergence. The study recommends that policymakers prioritize maintaining macroeconomic stability, fostering a predictable investment climate, and ensuring transparency and accountability within these groups. Also, regional blocs should support policy harmonization and cooperation within regions to promote FDI convergence, considering the unique characteristics of each region.

As Southern African economies continue to struggle with achieving Sustainable Development Goal 1 (eradicating poverty), there is an increasing need for strong collaboration between public and private sectors to accomplish this goal, as the public sector cannot achieve it alone. Based on this, this study examines the influence of public‐private partnership investments (PPPI) on poverty and its severity in Southern African economies from 2000 to 2019. We employed the Panel Vector Autoregressive (PVAR) model approach. The PPPI was categorized into investments in energy and transport. We find that the contributions of PPPI in energy and transport to the reduction of poverty and its severity are extremely small, suggesting that PPPI in these sectors has a negligible immediate effect on poverty and its severity. The study recommends long‐term PPPI strategies in energy and transport to reduce poverty and its severity by enhancing accessible and affordable infrastructures in these sectors and beyond. Theoretically, this work pioneers the systematic application of the Panel Vector Autoregressive (PVAR) model to sectoral Public‐Private Partnership Investments (PPPI) and confirms that poverty persistence in the region is consistent with Poverty Trap theories; politically, it provides crucial evidence compelling Southern African governments to adopt long‐term, integrated strategies that address structural inequalities and policy coherence beyond short‐term infrastructure investments.