ABSTRACT SSNIT pension benefit is the primary source of retirement income among formal sector workers and most recently informal sector workers in Ghana. It is also the most comprehensive form of social security among formal sector workers and pensioners in Ghana. But the SSNIT pension benefit is mostly meager and inadequate especially in financing consumption expenditure of pensioners and their dependants. This creates a consumption-pension income disparity which this study sorts to investig...
ABSTRACT In Ghana, most of the oil needs of the country is largely dependent on imported crude oil which makes imported crude oil an essential part of the economy and as such changing world oil prices is a concern that needs to be examined. This thesis examines the effect of world oil prices on Ghana’s cereal (maize and rice) prices using monthly data covering the period 1990 to 2015. Using the Vector Error Correction Models and generalized impulse response analysis, the study finds that am...
ABSTRACT The incidence of cross-country per capita income convergence has been debated for long by economists; all in the attempt to either validate or reject the per capita income convergence hypothesis as predicted by the Human capital - augmented Solow model (HC-ASM). However, researchers seem to have given little attention to Sub-Saharan African (SSA) in this ongoing discourse despite the wide per capita income disparity gap in the region. This present study fills this gap by conducting a...
This paper investigated the threshold effect of financial inclusion on poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using an annual dataset spanning 2010 to 2017, the Hansen’s estimation and Differenced generalized method of moments (GMM) methods were used to estimate the threshold level of financial inclusion that will reduce poverty and factors that influence financial inclusion respectively. The results showed that beyond a threshold level of 0.365, financial inclusion would lead to po...
ABSTRACT This study investigates the contribution of the Services sector to total tax revenue and economic growth in Ghana, with particular focus on the Telecommunication subsector. Quarterly time series data for the period 2008 to 2016 was used for the analysis within the Autoregressive Distributed Lagged (ARDL) framework. Additional qualitative information was elicited from key tax administrators to ascertain the challenges confronting tax mobilization in the telecom subsector to authentica...
ABSTRACT Sub-Saharan Africa has over the years witnessed the proliferation of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) within the sub-region. However, intra-regional trade remains considerably low around 10 percent of its trade with the rest of the world. This has led researchers to investigate whether these RTAs have been trade-creating or trade diverting. Nevertheless, these studies have not extended their analysis to investigate the effect of the membership of some dominant economies in their resp...
ABSTRACT Urbanization is recognized as a key driver of rapid economic growth, structural transformation and poverty reduction. The enormous body of both theoretical and empirical knowledge widely supports the idea of a positive relationship between urbanization and economic growth. However, at the core of the existing debate is the causal direction. The first part of the study investigated the causal relationship between urbanization and economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from the tw...
ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of investment in the Nigerian economy by making use of time series data for the period, 1970-2015. The study employed the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) for the analysis. From the result, it is shown that exchange rate, interest rate, inflation rate, and total financial saving, all have a positive effect on investment whereas external debt has a negative effect on investment. Therefore, the Government should improve the...
Abstract This study examines empirical determinants of inflation dynamics in Nigeria between 1995 and 2018 fiscal years. It employed monthly data that were sourced from the Central bank of Nigerian Statistical Bulletin, 2018 edition. Several studies have examined inflation determinants in Nigeria for several periods, but the empirical findings of some of these studies are mixed in terms of the different forms of inflation. Headline inflation, which is the most, reported inflation in Newspaper...
ABSTRACT The study is in two folds. It first examined the effect of land tenure security dimensions on households‘ soil improvement and subsequently explored the effect of soil improvement on maize output among smallholder farmers in the Northern Region of Ghana. The data employed for this study were obtained from the 2011 Innovation for Poverty Action survey. The endogeneous switching regression model was employed for the analyses. The study found that, households who had full land right...
ABSTRACT The ability to innovate technology represents the highest degree of development of an industrial society. However, there has not been much research focused on innovation of a firm, especially in the apparel manufacturing industries in Ghana. The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of innovation within the context of the apparel industry, using cross sectional data collected on fifty apparel firms selected from the Accra Metropolis in the Greater Accra region of...
ABSTRACT Ghana’s pursuit of outward-oriented trade liberalization and capital account liberalization polices since the 1980’s has the proclivity of subjecting the economy to external shocks that may affect the size of government. It is therefore imperative that the effects of external interferences within the domestic economy on government’s spending behavior are examined. In this light, this study investigate the short-run and long-run effects of trade and financial openness on governm...
Wells Fargo is in the news, but for the wrong reasons. The company has been fined US$185 million and more than 5,000 employees have been fired for secretly creating more than 2 million customer accounts without the customers knowing it. Indications are that the woes of the bank are only just beginning. The scandal brewing is a result of the “Gr-eight” Initiative, a cross-sell initiative by the bank which takes advantage of customer loyalty to increase the average number of products held b...
Abstract This paper investigates the internationalisation strategies of Ghanaian service companies within the economic community of West African States (ECOWAS) market. The topic was necessitated by the increasing interest in the study of internationalisation processes of local firms in this era of globalisation, which hitherto was the preserve of multinational enterprises from the developed world. There is very little research on internationalisation processes of firms within the developing ...
ABSTRACT Most developing countries face the problem of raising tax revenue to carry out public sector spending. Tax revenue is necessary for economic growth and development. Unfortunately tax revenue generation has been low in Ghana. This study therefore examined the determinants of tax revenue with evidence from Ghana using quarterly data from 1988 to 2008. The tax effort function is used by regressing government expenditure, real gross domestic product and financial deepening on tax reven...