The Relationship between Inflation and Unemployment in Ghana: Analysis of the Philips Curve

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between inflation and unemployment in Ghana. The study also aims to test for the existent of the Philips curve in Ghana using the new Keynesian Philips curve model on annual time series data sampled from 1970 to 2013. The sample period was divided into two subsamples -from 1970 to 1982 and 1983 to 2013- in order to test for the effect of the Economic Recovery Programme on the relationship between inflation and unemployment. The empirical estimate reveals that, changes in unemployment does not brings about changes in inflation both subsample periods. Again, the study rejects evidence of the Philips curve in Ghana. This is attributed to the fast growing labour force that lack the appropriate skills to earn them a job placement, alarming rate of rural-urban migration, imperfect market information which has resulted in mismatch of that makes inflation unresponsive to changes in unemployment. Monetary policies to influence inflation would not bring about any trade-off between inflation and unemployment. To reduce the ever increasing unemployment in Ghana, policy direction should focus on creating job opportunities for both uneducated and educated individuals.Keywords: Inflation, Unemployment, Philips curve, Ghan

Grouping Optimization Based on Social Relationships

Grouping based on social relationships is a complex problem since the social relationships within a group usually form a complicated network. To solve the problem, a novel approach which uses a combined sociometry and genetic algorithm (CSGA) is presented. A new nonlinear relation model derived from the sociometry is established to measure the social relationships, which are then used as the basis in genetic algorithm (GA) program to optimize the grouping. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, three real datasets collected from a famous college in Taiwan were utilized. Experimental results show that CSGA optimizes the grouping effectively and efficiently and students are very satisfied with the grouping results, feel the proposed approach interesting, and show a high repeat intention of using it. In addition, a paired sample t-test shows that the overall satisfaction on the proposed CSGA approach is significantly higher than the random method

Migration and Pandemics

This open access book discusses the socio-political context of the COVID-19 crisis and questions the management of the pandemic emergency with special reference to how this affected the governance of migration and asylum. The book offers critical insights on the impact of the pandemic on migrant workers in different world regions including North America, Europe and Asia. The book addresses several categories of migrants including medical staff, farm labourers, construction workers, care and domestic workers and international students. It looks at border closures for non-citizens, disruption for temporary migrants as well as at special arrangements made for essential (migrant) workers such as doctors or nurses as well as farmworkers, ‘shipped’ to destination with special flights to make sure emergency wards are staffed, and harvests are picked up and the food processing chain continues to function. The book illustrates how the pandemic forces us to rethink notions like membership, citizenship, belonging, but also solidarity, human rights, community, essential services or ‘essential’ workers alongside an intersectional perspective including ethnicity, gender and race

Migration and Pandemics

This open access book discusses the socio-political context of the COVID-19 crisis and questions the management of the pandemic emergency with special reference to how this affected the governance of migration and asylum. The book offers critical insights on the impact of the pandemic on migrant workers in different world regions including North America, Europe and Asia. The book addresses several categories of migrants including medical staff, farm labourers, construction workers, care and domestic workers and international students. It looks at border closures for non-citizens, disruption for temporary migrants as well as at special arrangements made for essential (migrant) workers such as doctors or nurses as well as farmworkers, ‘shipped’ to destination with special flights to make sure emergency wards are staffed, and harvests are picked up and the food processing chain continues to function. The book illustrates how the pandemic forces us to rethink notions like membership, citizenship, belonging, but also solidarity, human rights, community, essential services or ‘essential’ workers alongside an intersectional perspective including ethnicity, gender and race

Feminizing migration patterns and remittances: socio-economic experiences of female migrant street vendors, Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.Using the African Feminist Theory coupled with Migration theory and the Social Identity Theory and qualitative/phenomenology research design, this study purposively sampled twenty (20) women who are street vendors in Pietermaritzburg KwaZulu-Natal. The study is titled: Feminizing migration patterns and remittances: socio-economic experiences of female migrant’s street vendors, PMB, KwaZulu-Natal. This anthropological study revealed quite a number of research findings; it proved that feminized migration is a dawn that has allowed women to have a financial muscle that they have used to remit back to advance their families, education and health needs of their children and families at large. This study also revealed that migration patterns have allowed women to migrate from different parts of Southern Africa; hence most research participants came from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Malawi, Mozambique, Ghana, Congo and Botswana. The analysis of the study shows that female street vendors don’t occupy vending stalls. Another pertinent finding of the study is that Pietermaritzburg streets proved to be an informal economic space from which these women have generated money that they own, which has lowered their dependency on their husbands. This study revealed that even women who head households have embarked on migration patterns to provide for their families as they are not married. While street vending has proved to have been an informal economic space for foreign women. The study also revealed that foreign women are vending illegally as they don’t have licenses to trade on the street. Most women indicated that they were occupying rented stalls. This means that some South Africans who had licensed stalls are now generating income from these women, but owners of these stalls are often not around to protect them when evicted by policies because they can’t produce licenses. The study revealed that these female street vendors sell different goods; some sell corrugated iron baths (ubhavu wokugeza kathayela), brooms and bath dishes, fruits and vegetables, airtime, chips and sweets etc. depending on the targeted group of people in that area. This study revealed that their daily earnings between R1050 and R2500 prove that Pietermaritzburg streets are full of economic possibilities. These women can safeguard their vending earnings, which are remitted formally while others are informally remitted. With financial independence, these women had the state of holding sufficient financial gain to fund their surviving expenditure for their entire living without having to work or seek help from their spouses. The study revealed that these remittances play a role in raising the standard of living of those who receive these remittances and assisting the global poverty. Study findings also revealed that Covid-19 restrictions were imposed in South Africa to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus and decrease the number of fatalities impacted on street vendors. They were not allowed to sell during the stricter levels of lockdown. However, amid such conditions, women remittances played a constitutional part in changing the socio-economic situations of the people left in households, It has allowed them to buy necessities such as food and clothing. Many can now afford to buy sanitary towels for their girl children, which means that the young girls no longer miss school because they now have their monthly supply of sanitary towels. Study contributions and recommendations are discussed in the last chapter of this thesis

Pandemics: Insurance and Social Protection

This open access book collects expert contributions on actuarial modelling and related topics, from machine learning to legal aspects, and reflects on possible insurance designs during an epidemic/pandemic. Starting by considering the impulse given by COVID-19 to the insurance industry and to actuarial research, the text covers compartment models, mortality changes during a pandemic, risk-sharing in the presence of low probability events, group testing, compositional data analysis for detecting data inconsistencies, behaviouristic aspects in fighting a pandemic, and insurers’ legal problems, amongst others. Concluding with an essay by a practicing actuary on the applicability of the methods proposed, this interdisciplinary book is aimed at actuaries as well as readers with a background in mathematics, economics, statistics, finance, epidemiology, or sociology

Developing Event Identification Methods for Structured and Unstructured Data Streams

Data, now more than ever before, are continuously being generated in huge volumes, andat rapid speed. Data may originate from various sources, for instance: sensor readings,financial transactions, social networks, etc.. A data stream is a continuous sequence ofdata arriving in almost real-time and often at a high speed. In this thesis, we are interested in benefiting from the availability of such data anddeveloping methods for detecting the occurrence of events from data streams, such as atext stream and a price time-series stream. Hence, we have explored event identificationfrom structured and unstructured data streams in the domain of finance. We employ the Directional Change (DC) approach to high frequency time-seriesstreams to identify significant price transitions (i.e. events). DC is an event-basedapproach for summarizing price movements based on a fixed, a-priori threshold. Wepropose a dynamic threshold definition method, which replaces the fixed threshold andis appropriate for markets that operate over specific opening and closing times. Adynamic threshold provides more flexibility and extends the DC approach allowing theidentification of price changes in continuously changing environments. With the proliferation of social media data reporting on all aspects of human activ-ity, being able to automatically identify events is becoming increasingly important. Wepresent a framework for detecting the occurring events on a daily basis, via social net-work streams. We develop and extend a Frequent Pattern Mining method by proposinga dynamic support definition method to replace the fixed support. As the number oftext posts streamed each day is not fixed, a dynamic support, can adapt to the natureof data streams and can improve the identification of events. Finally, we explore whether we can bring together the insights from the time-seriesstream and the social network stream to understand if events as identified from bothstreams can be correlated

Budget Policy of Social Development

The monograph is devoted to the development of methodological and institutional framework for the formation of fiscal policy to ensure social development. The essence and role of budget regulation in supporting the processes of endogenous economic growth are revealed. The experience of the implementation of fiscal policy in countries with developed and transformational economies is systematized. The directions of increasing the efficiency and strengthening the regulatory potential of the state tax policy are proposed. An assessment of the tax burden on labor and consumption in 2001–2017 is carried out; a comparative analysis of the values of the corresponding indicators in Ukraine and the European Union member countries is carried out. The factors that affect the fiscal significance of the value added tax, excise tax, income tax, personal income tax are identified. Provisions for enhancing the effectiveness of the institutional architectonics of the budget system are improved. Directions for improving the efficiency of budget expenditures are substantiated. The analysis of the influence of the main factors on the dynamics of changes in the ratio of public debt to GDP is carried out; it is established that inflation affected the most, and the exchange rate influenced the increase. An approach to assessing the state of debt security of the country is proposed, the conceptual framework for managing the budget deficit and public debt is defined. Provisions for the implementation of long-term budget planning and forecasting are developed. Institutional framework for the formation of the budget strategy is improved. The conceptual foundations of state financial support for human development are defined. A long-term budget strategy is developed, taking into account the cyclical nature of economic development. The conducted scientific research allows identifying the possibilities of positive influence of the budget policy on social development in the context of improving the quality of the institutional environment

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality