ABSTRACT To determine the correct mix of dividend and retained earnings and how it affects profitability has been a subject in Literature of financial management. This research came in to contribute to the on-going debate by examining the relationship between dividend pay-out and financial performance of manufacturing firms listed in the Nairobi Securities Exchange. The key motivation was to establish if the findings of this study are consistent with prior empirical studies as found in both S...
ABSTRACT The main purpose of this study was to determine the effect of energy price liberalization on economic growth in Kenya. Energy sector is an important component of economy, and just like other goods and services, energy price affects its demand, supply and use. The use of energy is embedded in the production function that leads to economic growth. In Kenya, the energy sector contributes about 9.49 percent of GDP with the petroleum sector, electricity sector and fuel wood sector contrib...
ABSTRACT Agricultural activities contribute about 33% of the East African Community‟s Gross Domestic Product (World Bank, 2009), 80 per cent of the populace depend on agriculture directly and indirectly for food, employment and income, while about 40 million people in EAC suffer from hunger. Intra-EAC trade is very low, that is, at 9 per cent of the total regional trade, but it is on upward trend. Agricultural trade accounts for over 40 per cent of the intra-EAC trade. This study investigat...
ABSTRACT The Constituencies Development Fund is one of the decentralized efforts started by Government of Kenya to tackle poverty and regional imbalances in Kenya since 2003. It has allocated over 40 per cent of the resources annually to education sector including bursaries. However, doubts have been cast over time as to whether the Fund’s expenditure is effectively targeted towards meeting the needs of the poor as anticipated especially in the education bursaries that take substantial reso...
ABSTRACT This study investigated the dynamic linkage between foreign equity flows and equity returns at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) since foreign equity flows are expected to induce a surge in domestic stock prices and consequently a fall in price when foreign equity investors exit the domestic stock market. An increase in the stock prices attracts foreign investors in to the domestic stock market. The main objective of this study was to understand how stock prices in Kenya influenc...
ABSTRACT The development of microfinance in Kenya is seen as a catalyst for promoting household welfare and performance of micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Through various policy frameworks, the sub-sector has recorded considerable increases in; microfinance gross lending, usage of informal microfinance and the number of licensed microfinance banks. Despite these developments, households continue to face low levels of welfare while MSEs continue to suffer from high levels of financial excl...
ABSTRACT Most of the studies relating banking activities and macroeconomic behavior of many nations focused on the effect of macroeconomic instability on banking sectors. This study rather examines the impact of banking instability on the Nigerian economy. Annual data were used ranging from 1980 to 2011 drawn from various data publication issues domestically and those outside the country. Variables taken into consideration in the course of analysis are those proxies to the banking instabilit...
ABSTRACT This study has observed the impact of foreign aid to the agriculture, education and health sectors, on the growth of the respective sectors in Ghana, over a period from 1980 to 2013 using the Vector Autoregression (VAR) approach. The necessary time series tests such as stationary test, cointegration test, error correction, and Granger causality tests in vector error correction model were carried out. The empirical results from the regression reveals that, foreign aid has a significa...
ABSTRACT After about a decade of civil war, Liberia still has a fertility similar to other countries who have not had such similar experiences. The civil war was expected to lead to a decrease in fertility given the expected increased usage of contraceptives and decrease in the desire for children. So, the question about the role of education, contraception and desired fertility was asked. To answer this question, four main questions were asked. First, whose education is more significant in ...
ABSTRACT Considering the level of inequality (GINI) and its importance in economic performance and the attainments of human development (HD), this paper examines the role of inequality in the translation of economic growth (GDPG) to HD. The study was conducted using 39 African countries from the period of 1980 to 2015. A change in non-income HD measure (△HD) comprising life expectancy at birth and education with a five-year difference was computed. An average for every five-year period cor...
ABSTRACT The East African Community (EAC) is actively pursuing the formation of a monetary union by 2023. The EAC is located in the eastern part of Africa and is made up of six neighbouring countries namely; Burundi, South Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The countries have so far made considerable progress towards monetary integration with the establishment of a customs union in 2005 and a common market in 2010. The EAC Monetary Union (EAMU) protocol lays the groundwork for the mo...
ABSTRACT Research into expenditure patterns of households using external remittances for consumption or investment purpose has gained prominent attention in academic and policy circles recently. This study joins the debate to analyze the relationship between external migrant remittances and household expenditure patterns in Ghana. The study looks at key consumption and investment variables namely food, utilities, education, health, agriculture and housing to assess the expenditure behavior o...
ABSTRACT The wave of technological advancement has made electricity an indispensable input in an economy. It reigns at the center of households’ basic activities and productivity of industrial and service firms. Its supply in Ghana, like many other African countries has however, not been consistent over the years. This lays demand on policymakersfrom households and firms to increase the quantity supplied. In response to this, several thermal plants have been installed to augment the limite...
ABSTRACT The number of global working poor far exceeds the number of unemployed people. Thus, employment creation is not sufficient for poverty alleviation. For this reason, the concept of ‘decent work’, which seeks to measure the quality and quantity of work was proposed by the ILO in 1999 as a necessary and sufficient condition for poverty eradication. Achieving universal decent work is now one of the first eight SDG’s to be achieved by all countries in 2030. Previous studies on dece...
ABSTRACT In Nigeria, health insurance is not a commonly purchased financial instrument. Recently debates have revolved around extending health insurance coverage to a wider range of the population, via compulsory insurance scheme. However, the debate rarely considers the competing demands placed on the family budget. In this work, we examined the factors that will increase the benefits of those that have health insurance cover in the formal sector and the factors that will influence th...