Paper Review “Financial Liberalization, Crisis and Restructuring: A Comparative study of bank performance and bank governance in South East Asia Authors: Jonathan Williams, and Nghia Nguyen: Journal of Banking and Finance 29 (2005) 2119 – 2154”

This paper examines the impact of changes in bank governance on bank performance for a sample of commercial banks operating in South East Asia between 1990 and 2003.  To meet their objective, authors collect data from Bankscope and IBCA databases for bank financial statements whilst macroeconomic data were obtained from the IMF International Financial Statistics and the Asian Development Bank. To qualify bank ownership, authors relied on the aforementioned databases, bank websites, and academic sources that have detailed changes in banking ownership including privatizations

Determinants of Poverty on Household Characteristics in Zanzibar: A logistic Regression Model

The two succession of Zanzibar Household Budget Survey (ZHBS) in 2004/2005 and 2009/2010 use head count to address poverty as the base of all analysis with several social and economic variables. This study attempts to use logistic regression to venture ratio of the probability of occurrence of poverty in Zanzibar with social dimension. The study reveals that social demographic dimensions are important in explaining poverty and that the likelihood of poverty significant relates to household size, household head, and basic education (primary and secondary). Furthermore, the study exposes that all district in Pemba are on high risk of being enter into poverty. Key words: Zanzibar, poverty, households, determinant of poverty, logistic regressio

Export Trade and Economic Growth in Tanzania: A Disaggregated Approach

This paper applies the Vector Autoregressive (VAR) technique to annual data from 1980 to 2009 to provide empirical evidence on the long-run relationship between exports trade and economic growth in Tanzania. The exports trade in this study is disaggregated into services and goods exports. Thus, the paper estimated two models. The first model deals with the relationship between export of services and growth, and the other one determines the relationship between goods export and growth. While the paper find no evidence for long-run relationship between export of goods and growth, our empirical results suggest existence of a long-run nexus between export of services and economic growth in Tanzania. The Granger causality test results have also confirmed existence of a unilateral causality from economic growth to service exports. Keywords: Export Trade; Economic Growth; Cointegration; Granger Causality.

Geophagia is not associated with Trichuris or hookworm transmission in Zanzibar, Tanzania

Geophagia may be harmful as a method for the transmission of geohelminths. In this study, we pose two questions in a representative sample of 970 pregnant women from Pemba Island, Zanzibar, Tanzania. Can consumed earth be a vector for geohelminth infection? And do geophagists have differential parasitic infection? The parasitological content of 59 non-food substance samples was analysed. Cross-sectional data regarding pica behaviour were collected through interviews conducted by local researchers. Ascaris, Trichuris and hookworm status was ascertained through Kato-Katz smears. The prevalence of geophagia at baseline was 5.6% and the overall prevalence of Ascaris, Trichuris and hookworm infection was 5.6%, 33.2% and 32.9%, respectively. No consumed soil samples contained infectious parasitic stages, and only one of the consumed pica substances (charcoal) contained parasites of potential risk to human health. In bivariate analyses, neither the prevalence nor the intensity of infection with Ascaris, Trichuris or hookworm differed significantly by geophagia status. Furthermore, in multivariate models, geophagia was not a significant predictor of helminth infection status. We conclude that geophagia is not a source of Trichuris or hookworm infection among pregnant women in Pemba (insufficient power to evaluate the effect of Ascaris), which is in contrast to existing findings of helminth infection and geophagia. © 2007 Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene