The economics in the U.S. of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems is changing rapidly as the cost per unit power of PV modules has dropped quickly. These costs reductions have two important results: marked decrease in levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) into ranges competitive or better than traditional electricity-generation technologies and the economic role of racking has been gaining prominence relative to that of modules. As the relative importance of costs of PV racking has been marginal hi...
Ph.D. scientists and engineers are highly qualified personnel (HQP) that improve U.S. economic efficiency and generate new products including weapons of interest to the intelligence community. HQP represent a small fraction of the population, which make them favorable targets to compromise. This study analyzes how to defend against a novel approach of covert infiltration that uses administrative techniques to neutralize HQP without recruiting them directly. The approach follows five hierarchi...
Distributed manufacturing even at the household level is now well established with the combined use of open source designs and self-replicating rapid prototyper (RepRap) 3-D printers. Previous work has shown substantial economic consumer benefits for producing their own polymer products. Now flexible filaments are available at roughly 3-times the cost of more conventional 3-D printing materials. To provide some insight into the potential for flexible filament to be both technically feasible a...
Abstract The lack of adequate finance has led to decline in the growth of the Small and Medium Scale Enterprise (SME) sector in Nigeria even with various instruments and policies put in place. This study employed Co-integration and Error Correlation Method (ECM) techniques to investigate the impact of commercial bank credits on SME growth in Nigeria between 1980 and 2016. The results revealed that SMEs and selected macroeconomic variables included in the model have a long run relationship wit...
This paper was written to define, determine and evaluate the various roles a corporate leader plays in a changing socio-economic environment and organization renewal. This paper evaluates the socio-economic environment and how it affects an organization, also the various type of corporate leadership style that would suit different level of organization renewal was reviewed, and the paper also focused on the various implications and impacts of a corporate leader’s decisions and cause of a...
This paper investigates the effect of smallholder livestock production on income among farm households in northern Ghana. Questionnaires were administered to 300 household heads and ordinary least squares estimation technique was applied to the dataset. The dependent variable was income and measured by total annual income received from farm and non-farm activities by household heads. The independent variable of interest was tropical livestock unit measured by flock size. We also included farm...
This study is undertaken to verify if the Ricardian Equivalence Hypothesis (REH) hold for Nigeria and Ghana using annual time-series data of both developing countries covering from 1970 to 2013; and taking previous empirical studies as its point of reference and departure. The broad objective of the study is dissected into the following specific objectives of the study as thus: to examine the effects of budget deficits on interest rates, inflation, and economic growth in Nigeria and Ghana wit...
Using time series such as GDP per capita, solid minerals output, foreign trade balance, domestic interest rate, inflation, and gross domestic savings, for the period 1960-2015. the Linear Growth Regression model adopted for this study indicates that solid minerals positively impact on sustainable growth and is statistically significant. The study also found that solid mineral is highly significant but negatively related with foreign exchange due largely to illegal migration of mineral commodi...
This study was necessary since inflation and unemployment are twin macroeconomic variables that exert influence on policy decision of any economy. Using time series from 1972 to 2015, the Ordinary Least Squares method was employed to determine both the short-run and long-run Phillips curve and ascertain if it is evident in Nigeria. The non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) was also estimated. The results establish the presence of negative relationship both inflation and unem...
This study adopts the Lerman and Yitzhaki approach to measure progressivity and re-ranking effects in health care financing in South East Nigeria. Result supports the existence of regressive healthcare payments. Households that spend more to healthcare financing are unable to maintain their original social status due to net income declining below prepayment income. This could certainly be catastrophic as it takes a huge proportion of the household's income, leaving households with insignifica...
It has been argued that public expenditure on education and health is a veritable tool in improving human capabilities. Expenditure on these sectors is categorized into recurrent and capital. While capital expenditure can go a long way in enhancing the productivity capacity, recurrent expenditure is for non-productive activities. Available statistics however shows that in Nigeria, emphasis has been on recurrent expenditure at the detriment of capital expenditure. This study therefore employed...
It has been enunciated that it is possible to reduce the size of the sacrifice ratio in an economy without a corresponding increase in the rate of inflation. Besides, for the Nigerian economy, there are issues relating to the inflation-output relationship, among which is how inflation inertia impacts on output and unemployment. It is therefore apt to ascertain what Nigeria’s sacrifice ratio could be after many successful inflation reductions over the years. Adopting the Instrumental Variabl...
In fiscal economics, tax has been recognized as veritable instrument in generating revenue and stabilizing growth. However, to determine if a country has made efforts at increasing tax revenue over a period, tax performance in the dynamic sense which measures the sensitivity and response of the tax revenue in relation to GDP is imperative. Motivated by this, we adopted the buoyancy approach to examine Tax revenue-GDP relationship using Nigeria data. This is to ascertain if the government is k...
Health care services in Nigeria are mainly financed through out-of-pocket payment. This study investigated the extent to which payments towards health care are related to ability to pay and if poor households make proportionally more out-of-pocket payment on health. In analyzing this, the study utilized data from the General household survey of the National Bureau of statistics of 2014. The study employed the Kakwani progressivity index in analyzing the objectives of the study. The findin...
In the face of continuous rise in price of essential commodities arising from the 2015-2016 currency crises which led to the introduction of different policies to tame the ugly tide, this paper analyzes the distributional impacts of the resulting prices on household welfare using two rounds of household data and commodity prices generated from National Bureau of Statistics Using pre-crisis post crises information and adopting Deaton and Muellbauer (1980) and Friedman & Levinson (2002) framewo...