Global Journal of Emerging Market Economies

A key policy objective of most oil-producing economies, especially among developing countries like Nigeria, is sustainable diversification of national income sources. For most oil-producing economies, this depends significantly on exploring the full potential of the non-oil sector. Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and co-integration analysis are used in this article to evaluate the growth impact of non-oil exports and sustainability of non-oil exports vis-à-vis growth in Nigeria. The regression result and the co-integration analysis show that growth evidence of non-oil exports exists in Nigeria; it is also sustainable. In other words, beyond export-led growth hypothesis, non-oil export-led growth hypothesis also holds in Nigeria.

The fast-evolving process of urbanization will transform Africa’s future. Urbanization can be harnessed to build an effective urban platform for the continent’s social and economic development, but this requires the right policies to capture the benefits of urban growth. The scope and scale of urban growth requires a fundamentally different approach to the current practice of making sporadic, large-scale infrastructure investments. Cities must be enabled to facilitate and finance ongoing investment programs, in partnership with local businesses and communities.

This article puts forward an agenda for achieving the 2050 vision that focuses on unlocking a more systematic approach to urban development and management. This requires the development of new partnerships for urban development and management, between tiers of government, with the private sector and citizens. It requires a greater focus on using local resources to leverage the financing needed to support urban growth. And it requires strengthened capacity for city planning and management to meet projected demand for land and services. National governments will need to play a leading role in repositioning and strengthening local city managers to meet the challenges of urban growth.

The map of the big Eurasian supercontinent is currently being shaped by three separate regional initiatives, the European Union (EU), a Eurasian Union proposed by Russia, and the plethora of fast-developing Asian groupings. In addition, Europe and Asia are flanked by two intercontinental developments across both Euro-Atlantic and Asian-Pacific areas, which effectively cut the Eurasian supercontinent in half. By contrast, the present article examines the case for a Greater Eurasia, which would embrace all of Europe and Asia. Eurasianism on a smaller scale already has several variants with long historical roots in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey, but these are addressing Lesser rather than Greater Eurasias. Concretely, there is already an important agenda of issues of concern for the whole of the Greater Eurasia: security around post-2014 Afghanistan; transcontinental transport connections; energy supplies and transit to both west and east; rationalization of the proliferating free trade areas; and Arctic cooperation, to name just a few. But there are also overarching long-term issues of political, economic, societal, and even philosophical nature facing this Greater Eurasia. The question is whether these immediate and longer-term issues need to be treated holistically with a growing sense of common Greater Eurasian identity, with a deepening institutional network of overlapping but differentiated bodies and arrangements. This Greater Eurasia is going to account for much of the advanced world far into the twenty-first century. It should, therefore, rise in significance as a strategic space alongside the current set of regional, intercontinental, and global groupings.

The aim of this article is to review the tectonic changes in the structure of economic linkages in the Eurasian continent. Within the last two decades, the end of the autarky of China and the COMECON bloc led to a dramatic opening to the global economy and to cooperation within the Eurasian continent. This is particularly visible with regard to trade. It is also visible in investment, where Eurasia is not only more integrated but also multipolar. Emerging pervasive cooperation in the Eurasian landmass is primarily a bottom-up story, with intergovernmental cooperation lagging behind the rapid developments on the micro level of companies and people. Since Eurasian linkages are highly dependent on the development of common infrastructure, there has recently been a great deal of activity in this field. Still, the cross-border railway and automotive infrastructure and electric power linkages in particular remain hugely underdeveloped.

On the normative side of the evolving Eurasian continent-wide cooperation and integration, there is a need for a deliberately low-key, pragmatic, and technocratic agenda. Institutional integration faces numerous hurdles in Greater Eurasia: the asymmetries of size; the level of development; and political regimes. These hurdles are unlikely to be overcome in the coming decades. Structuring cooperation according to a functional principle and focusing on such domains as physical infrastructure, some sector-specific and continent-relevant elements of regulatory convergence, as well as counteracting continent-wide issues of “shadow integration,” ranging from drug trafficking to epidemiological threats, is therefore crucial.