Determinants of Remittance: Panel Evidence From Selected Countries In Africa

The African continent has over 30 million people in the Diaspora and sends over 50 billion US Dollars to theirfamilies and communities back home ahead of FDI and ODA. It is on this premise that this study carries out aninvestigation on the determinants of Remittance across 21 African countries with neat selection from all theregions. The study uses the GMM estimation in a dynamic panel to find out that Remittance receipt of theprevious year, broad money growth, taxes, inflation, lending rate and age dependency ratio are significantdeterminants of remittance, while GDP per capita and real effective exchange rate are not. However, while broadmoney growth, tax revenue, GDP per capita, and real effective exchange rate are inversely related to Remittancereceipt, lending rate, age dependency ratio and inflation are positively related.Keywords: Determinants, Remittance, Africa, Dynamic panel

Determinants of Female Labour Force Participation in Nigeria: The Rural/Urban Dichotomy

Cultural and traditional beliefs that determine husband’s willingness to permit their spouse work are predominant in rural areas and this motivated the study to investigate the determinants of labour force separately in urban and rural sectors of Nigeria. The study employed the logistic regression on a house hold survey data of employment and discovered that the determinants of female labour participation were not the same in urban and rural areas. The results suggested that marital status, religion, poverty rate and per capita income were significant determinants in the rural sector, while age and literacy rate were the significant determinants in the urban sector. Since the determinants in the urban and rural regions were completely different, the study recommends that, discriminate policies be encouraged when designing measures to improve female labour participation. Key words: Female, Labour, Participation, Logistic regression, Rural, Urban, Nigeri

Access to credit for rice farmers and its impact on productivity: the case of Ebonyi State, Nigeria

This study examines the impact of access to bank and non-bank credit on rice productivity and output. It employed the coarsened exact matching (CEM) model and qualitative methods for primary data on a purposive sample of 450 rice farmers across three Local Government Areas of Ebonyi State, Nigeria. Pre-matching results suggest that access to non-bank credit and access to total credit significantly affected labour productivity and output, while access to bank credit significantly affected output. However, the post-matching results show that access to all three categories of credit has no significant effect on either output or capital, labour, and total factor productivity. This study therefore recommends that for an improved production and productivity yield among rice farmers in the state, policies should focus on the issues of improved quality of education and constraints in accessing loans/credits

Cluster Development in a Transforming Economy: The Case of Motorcycle Spare Parts Firms in Nnewi, Anambra State of Nigeria

This paper examined the impact of cluster development in Nnewi, Anambra State of Nigeria. The estimated parsimonious model revealed that capital and labour were significant determinants of sales made by the firms while the cluster dummy variable was insignificant. This insignificance of the cluster dummy variable implied that, in terms of total sales, there was no significant difference between firms in the cluster and firms outside the cluster. For the profit model, we found that capital, labour and the cluster dummy were significant at 1% level. Capital, labour and cluster dummy have a positive relationship with firm profit. The positive coefficient of the cluster dummy variable indicated that the profit of firms in the cluster was significantly higher than that of the firms outside the cluster by about ₦31,050. It was therefore concluded that cluster residency made a significant difference in firm profit and recommended that government should encourage cluster development to accelerate the transformation of the economy