Rural Women Entrepreneurship Development in Ovia North East, Edo State, Nigeria: The Case for Microcredit

The dream of the United Nation’s Millennium development Programme to which 189 countries including Nigeria pledged to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015 can only be achieved if microcredit scheme is given its rightly place in funding small scale entrepreneurs.  This paper focused on the impact of micro-credit on small scale entrepreneurs especially women in sustainable grassroot development. Data collected from a sample of 225 respondents analysed statistically suggests that availability and access to credit increases business profit and hence standard of living of the rural poor. It recommended therefore, that all the three tiers of government should make funds available to women entrepreneurs via the microfinance banks so they can act as catalyst for economic development. Keywords:  Entrepreneur, Microfinance and Economic Developmen

Developments in Money Market Operations and Economic Viability in Nigeria: An Empirical Analysis

Money market provides instruments for effective liquidity management and acts as the core source of raising short-term funds for lubricating economic activities in any nation. This study seeks to empirically explore developments in Money market operations and Economic viability in Nigeria. Economic viability is proxied by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and represents the explained variable. Core Money market instruments commonly used in Nigeria such as Treasury bills (TB), Treasury Certificate (TC), Certificate of Deposit (CD), Commercial Papers (CP) and Banker Acceptances (BA) served as the explanatory variables. The data used for empirical estimation covered the period 1981 to 2011 and were sourced from CBN statistical Bulletin, 2011. Analysis of data was carried out using Multiple Regression technique parameters. Research findings were robust. The variation in the growth trends of GDP and the explanatory variables in a graphic representation appear to cast doubts on whether Money market operations made significant contributions to GDP in the period under review. However, the results from Pearson correlation coefficient matrix substantially attest to strong linear relationship between the explained and explanatory variables. Besides, the summary statistics of the model as indicated by the Coefficient of determination (R2) and ANOVA F-Statistics showed that the estimated model passed the test of overall significance at all significant levels, implying that a long run relationship exists between Money market operations and Economic growth in Nigeria. Though, the study data relates solely to the Nigerian economy, it has strong relevance and implications for developing and emerging economies and monetary agencies globally. Therefore, we recommend that monetary authorities should initiate policies to boost Money market operations and be proactive in their surveillance role in order to check practices that are capable of sabotaging market soundness. Key Words: Developments, Money market, Money market instruments, Economic viability, Gross Domestic Products (GDP), Nigeri

Rethinking Regional Energy Policy: Towards Averting Another Energy Crisis. Do Threats Matter in The Supply and Generation Process?

The study investigates potential threats to energy security and sustainable electricity production from a regional perspective, after identifying a host of factors that are likely to affect sustainable energy production and supply using seemingly unrelated regression estimation, which produces efficient estimates by solving two unrelated regression simultaneously. Our results show that the identified threats to energy generation matter. Energy security which we described as the level of diversification in regional specific energy generating sources is probably being affected by regional specific level of industrialization and domestic energy consumption. Issues of over dependence on specific sources of energy supply (particularly nuclear production sources) were also found to have a negative effect on energy security and probably increase the risk of future failure in energy supply. Energy policy was also found to have a significant effect on energy security. The impacts of various constraints on electricity production were also considered. It was found that many factors affect electricity output production in regions particularly environmental factors that affect consumption and the generation process. Keywords: Energy Security, Electricity production, Seemingly Unrelated Regressio

Do High Customer Bank Deposits Incite Management Fraud? Examining Causes of Management Fraud in the Nigerian Banking Sector

The study investigates factors that incite fraud in the banking sector in Nigeria, using times series data for fraud obtained from CBN data from 1998 to 2010. It was found that high bank deposit were primarily responsible for a high rise fraudulent occurrences in the Nigerian banking sector particularly management fraud, some other factors that were also jointly responsible for these occurrences include high interest rates, low commercial bank lending and poor oversight function by the Central Bank and other financial regulatory agencies. The method of estimation used in the study is the quantile regression estimation method which is a non parametric estimation method based on the premise that the sample median will tend to that of the distributional median, it presents some obvious advantages over OLS (ordinary least squares) estimates, since the results are robust in the presence of outliers and heteroscedastic errors in the response measurement and allows for the exploration of other central tendencies and statistical dispersion properties of the dataset Machando and Silva (2013). The results are robust even after controlling for presence of heterscedastic error in the response measurement as well re-sampling the dataset (conducted by the bootstrapped quantile regression technique). Further explanation is also provided for the implication of variables identified to drive fraud occurrences using kernel density estimation. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n6p33

The Impact of Interest Rate on Bank Deposits Evidence from the Nigerian Banking Sector

The study investigates the effect of interest rates on customer savings behavior in the Nigerian banking sector, after identifying a host of factors that are likely to influence customer confidence in commercial banks such as average income, commercial lending, legal rights strength, central bank monetary policy and total annual commercial bank losses, using quantile regression estimation method, a non parametric estimation process that is based on the premise that the sample median will tend to that of the distribution and addresses issues of heteroscedastic errors and data stringency associated with the data used in the study under question. We find that interest rates were probably increasing bank deposits while income was also found to affect bank deposits in general

The Impact of Interest Rate on Bank Deposits Evidence from the Nigerian Banking Sector

The study investigates the effect of interest rates on customer savings behavior in the Nigerian banking sector, after identifying a host of factors that are likely to influence customer confidence in commercial banks such as average income, commercial lending, legal rights strength, central bank monetary policy and total annual commercial bank losses, using quantile regression estimation method, a non parametric estimation process that is based on the premise that the sample median will tend to that of the distribution and addresses issues of heteroscedastic errors and data stringency associated with the data used in the study under question. We find that interest rates were probably increasing bank deposits while income was also found to affect bank deposits in general