The Impact of Capital Formation on the Growth of Nigerian Economy

The paper investigated the impact of capital formation on economic growth in Nigeria. The data were collected from Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin (2011).To analyze the impact of capital formation, stock market capitalization, inflation rate and interest rate on economic growth, the study employed Ordinary least square (OLS) technique. To test for the properties of time series, phillip-perron test was used to determine the stationarity of the variables and it was discovered that gross fixed capital formation and economic growth are integrated of order zero (I(0), Johasen co integration test was employed to determine the order of integration while erro correction model was employed to determine the speed of adjustment to equilibrium. The empirical findings suggest that capital formation has positive and significant impact on economic growth in Nigeria for the period under review this result corroborate the findings of Bakare (2011), Orji and Mba (2010). Stock market also showed a positive impact, while both inflation rate and interest rate has a negative impact on economic growth in Nigeria for the period under review but the impact is statistically insignificant. The result further shows a long run relationship between capital formation and economic growth in Nigeria for the period under review. Therefore emphasis should be place on accumulating capital in Nigeria as this will accelerate growth and development in Nigerian economy. The Nigerian stock market should be deepened more to enhance their contribution to the growth of the domestic economy. Key Word: Capital Formation, Economic Growth, Inflation, Interest rate and stock market capitalization

Impact of Telecommuting on Employees’ Performance

This work examined the impact of telecommuting on employees’ performance. The dynamic nature of the environment in which our organizations operate and customers need made this investigation very necessary. The objectives of the study were; to find out if arrangement that enables employee to work at home has a positive relationship with better quality of work and to ascertain whether an arrangement that allows employee to work at agreed location has significant relationship with speedy service delivery. To achieve the objectives, a survey research design was adopted. The techniques employed in analyzing the data were descriptive statistics and spearman rank correlation coefficient. The results indicated that the arrangement that enables employee to work at home has a weak and positive relationship with better quality of work. It was also found that arrangement that allows employee to work at agreed location has a significant relationship with speedy service delivery. Based on the findings, the researcher concluded that telecommuting has impact on employee performance. It was recommended that managers of telecommunication out-fits should continue with the arrangement that allows employees to work at agreed location since it was found to have significant relationship with speedy service delivery but also ensure that, there is a strong mechanism on ground to monitor the activities of the telecommuters

Official development assistance, income per capita and health outcomes in developing countries: Is Africa different?

In this study, we investigate the effect of official development assistance and income per capita on health outcomes in developing countries. Health outcome is proxied by life expectancy and under-5-mortality rate. We accounted for the endogeneity problem in the model by employing a dynamic two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator. We find that official development assistance does not improve health outcome in developing countries, while income per capital significantly improves health outcome in developing countries. The study reports that CO2 emission is not a significant determinant of health outcome in developing countries but the prevalence of HIV and Immunization significantly determines health outcomes in developing countries. More specifically the prevalence of HIV increases the under-5-mortality rate and decreases life expectancy; immunization increases life expectancy but decreases under-5-mortality rate. It was equally revealed in the study that health outcome in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) does not significantly differ from health outcomes in other developing countries. We equally reported that the effect of income per capita on health outcome in Sub-Saharan Africa countries is not significantly different from that of non-SSA countries. The effect of official development assistant on health outcome in SSA was found to be significantly different from non-SSA countries. The study reveals that the effect of ODA on life expectancy in SSA is less compared to its effect on non-SSA countries. Similarly, the effect of ODA on under-5-mortality is higher in SSA countries as against other non-SSA countries