ABSTRACT Commercialization has potential of enabling rural households to advance in vegetable production through better access to financial services, and enriched market coordination and participation. In recent years, there have been efforts to boost vegetable commercialization particularly among smallholder female farmers in Kilifi County. Since risk attitudes vary from male to female farmers, the differences in risks and risk perceptions of farmers may in part explain the unwillingn...
ABSTRACT The challenge of agricultural finance is to securely provide cost-effective financing to rural smallholder farmers with minimum risk of fraud and maximum accountability and transparency. Mobile money payments by farmers can provide the transactional volume economics for creating an ecosystem that can be subsequently leveraged on branchless banking distribution channel for mobile banking credit, savings and micro insurance products. Mobile money is simple, convenient, affordable and d...
ABSTRACT Teachers are an important human resource in the teaching and learning processes and their training and utilization therefore requires critical consideration. The education sector in Kenya faces many challenges, including escalating teacher wage bill, teacher shortages in schools alongside surpluses in the labour market, inequitable distribution and inefficient utilization of teachers. There is therefore the need for a framework for projecting and relating demand to the supply in orde...
This study empirically explored the effect of East African Community (EAC) integration on intra-EAC trade, as reflected by the level of exports, of the East African Community member states over the period 1980- 2012. This time period captured the pre and post EAC eras. Most empirical studies on Regional Integration investigate whether the Gravity Model hold for trading partners. Others investigate the effect of tariffs and other trade barriers on trade but this study considered the influence ...
ABSTRACT A key policy objective ofsustainable economic development, especially in any developing country like Nigeria, is to establish energy development paths that are both economically e.f .f icient and sustainable. However, this depends significantly 012 full utilization ofsuch resources. This resear~hw ork adopts an econometric approach to evaluate both the impact and the sustainability of Gas utilization in the Nigerian economy. Also, it examines the structure ofgas flaring in N...
ABSTRACT This study investigated the effect of exchange rate on Nigeria’s non-oil sector outputs, with emphasis on the agricultural, manufactural and service sectors over a period of 1970-2012 through the co integration and the ECM approach. The co integration test showed that there was a long run relationship between the variables. Evidence suggested that exchange rate by has a negative non-significant effect on the agricultural and manufacturing sectors and a nonsignificant positive...
ABSTRACT The primary motive of a minimum wage policy is to provide a wage floor for low income earners and improve their welfare. In Nigeria, real minimum wage declined by 83.0% between 1974 and 2010, thus lowering the welfare of workers. Low skilled relative to high skilled workers’ wages also declined from 29.0% in 1991 to 11.0% in 2007. While there is a growing body of literature on the direct effects of minimum wage, there have been little attempts to investigate its indirect welfare a...
Abstract The second West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), comprising The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, was initiated in 1999 to fast-track the common monetary policy objective of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). However, uncertainties about the economic implications of the policy have been major obstacles to regional integration. Economists and policymakers are yet to agree on the potential costs and benefits of a common currency. Available empirical st...
ABSTRACT A general way of evaluating the economic welfare of country is through its household per capita expenditure. Thus, the major purpose for this study is to investigate how the recent financial deepening processes in Nigeria have impacted on aggregate welfare. Private per capita consumption expenditure is used to measure aggregate welfare in this study which serves as a macroeconomic measure of indicators of aggregate welfare. Financial deepening can affect aggregate welfare in various...
ABSTRACT In line with the search for the real determinant of economic growth, this work sought to analyze the impact of institutional quality, government expenditure on economic growth, using a panel data analysis for four selected West African Countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso) from 2005 to 2013. The study found a positive and significant relationship between some institutions – economic institutions, on economic growth whereas political institutions showed a n...
ABSTRACT The study arose out of the need to tackle the challenges which emanated from the distortion of money demand and stress on inflation as banking crisis occurred. The challenges include liquidity squeeze and increased interest rate which undermined monetary policy implementation, reduced investment and sharply contracted economic activities. The study estimated the effects of banking crisis on money demand and inflation in Nigeria from 1970Q1 to 2014Q2. The specific objectives we...
ABSTRACT Rachuonyo South district is resource endowed in terms of land productivity as is evidenced by annual production outputs of various crops. Sweet potatoes are the main cash crops grown in these areas alongside others such as pineapples, bananas and to some extent tea and coffee. The high outputs enjoyed from the productive lands have not however translated into good living conditions for the residents as their products fetch little in terms of market price the farmers get. Farmers hav...
ABSTRACT In recent years, governmental and nongovernmental organizations in many low-income countries have introduced credit programs targeted to the poor. Many of these programs specifically target the poor on the premise that they are more likely to be credit constrained and have restricted access to the wage labour market. Though participation is by choice, little is known about the role of credit on welfare. The purpose of this study was then to assess the role of credit service on welfa...
ABSTRACT Kenya’s smallholder maize-legume farmers are faced by many challenges in production, among them soil mining, input acquisition, and low soil fertility. In an attempt to address these challenges, the use of Sustainable Agricultural Intensification Practices (SAIPs) has been promoted widely. However, their uptake has remained low among smallholder maize-legume farmers and it is unclear whether social capital influences SAIPs uptake. Using secondary data from Australian International...
ABSTRACT This paper tests the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis for two Anglophone ECOWAS members, Nigeria and Ghana. The researcher tested the relative PPP equation. It also employed the ADF univariate Unit Root test for the stationarity of the exchange rates of each of the countries. Exchange rates and CPIs data for all countries were collected on annual basis for the period between 1970 and 2005. The results show the non-rejection of the null hypothesis of the fail...