Determinants Of Foreign Direct Investment Inflows In Swaziland’s Agricultural Sector

Foreign direct investment plays a significant role in the development and growth of developing countries. The main objective of the study was to analyse the determinants of foreign direct investment inflows in Swaziland’s agricultural sector from 1990 to 2014. The study examined the long-run and short-run effects by using the cointegration th eory and the error correction model. The dependent variable was agriculture foreign direct investment inflows stock, while the explanatory variables were; government foreign debt, nominal GDP, trade openness, exchange rate, inflation and investment promotion. The study used the Breusch-Pagan-Godfrey test for heteroscedasticity. The Engle-Granger cointegration test was conducted to test the hypothesis that there was no cointegration between the dependent variable and the independent variables. The long-run regression results revealed that nominal GDP and investment promotion were positive and significant determinants of agriculture FDI (p<0.01). Their coefficients were 1.393 and 0.983 respectively. In the short-run, trade openness and investment promotion were significant and positive (p<0.01) with coefficients of 1.483 and 1.05 respectively. The error correction model was within the acceptable range and it had the expected negative sign. Its coefficient was -0.431 suggesting that about 43% of the short-run shocks were adjusted back to the long-run path within a year. The study recommends that the Swaziland Government must focus on increasing the rate of GDP growth mainly through the encouragement of processing of raw materials to finished goods and also improve on openness to trade. Keywords: Agricultural foreign direct investment, cointegration model, trade openness, nominal GDP.

Response of Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L) Walp) to Nitrogen Fertilizers and Leaf Plucking Frequencies

Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) seeds and leaves are an important item in the diet of most farmers in the tropics. The tender and succulent leaves are generally plucked and used as green vegetables until about flowering, when leaf plucking stops. Defoliation may adversely affect seed yield due to reduction in photosynthetic area. One possible means of reducing the adverse effects of defoliation on seed yield is, to apply additional nitrogen fertilizer to stimulate vegetable growth, hence this experiment. The effects of three nitrogen levels (0,50 and 100 kg/ha) and four leaf plucking treatments (no plucking, plucking once a week, once in two weeks and once in three weeks) on leaf and seed yield of cowpeas were investigated at the University of Swaziland, Faculty of Agriculture, Luyengo during the 1997/98 growing season. The design of the trial was randomized complete block with twelve treatment combinations and each was replicated three times. Data collected included canopy height and width, area of plucked leaves, fresh and dry weight of plucked leaves, 100-seed mass, seed yield and monetary value of seeds and leaves. Data showed that additional nitrogen increased seed yield significantly (

Microwave radiation in the modification of iron Fischer-Tropsch catalysts

Potassium-promoted unsupported iron Fischer–Tropsch catalysts have been subjected to microwave radiation treatment as part of the catalyst preparation process. The treatment is applied after the catalysts have been dried and calcined. Solid-state modifications occur which result in changes in the manner and quantity of carbon monoxide adsorbed on the surface as detected by temperature programmed surface reaction (TPSR) with hydrogen. Methane is the essential product of the TPSR runs. The response to microwave treatment is an increase in the methane production at all potassium levels, but the magnitude of the increase is potassium-loading dependent and peaks at a potassium loading of 0.7 wt%. Microwave-induced changes in TPSR characteristics appear to result from selective heating occurring almost immediately on exposure of the catalysts to radiation. Longer duration of microwave exposure does not appear to result in further changes

First report of cryptosporidiosis in paediatric patients in Swaziland

Diarrhoeal disease is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in many African countries, especially among the immunocompromised and the under five population. Over the last decade, the protozoan parasite Cryptosporidum spp. has been shown to be a significant cause of gastro-enetritis in the immunocompetent and immunocompromised in both the developed and developing world. This study reports the first finding of Cryptosporidum spp. oocysts in 2 of 48 (4.2%) faecal samples obtained from Swazi paediatric outpatients (two year old male and three year old female), presenting with diarrhoea at Mbabane Government Hospital between the months July - August 2003. Oocysts were detected using a standard anti-Cryptosporidium immunofluorescence and nuclear staining technique (after formal-ether concentration). Oocysts ranged in size from 4 - 6 µm with between 1 - 4 oocysts per field of view (× 400). The precise species was not determined. Further studies are required to determine the public health significance of Cryptospoirdium in Swaziland

Sexual harassment: The ‘silent killer’ of female students at the University of Ayoba in South Africa

The current non-experimental study sought to establish the extent to which sexual harassment takes place at the institution under investigation, which for reasons of anonymity will be referred to as the University of Ayoba.) The research problem of this study is articulated through the following research questions: (1) What is sexual harassment? (2) Does sexual harassment exist in the University of Ayoba? (3) How is sexual harassment handled at University of Ayoba? The study targeted female fourth year students in the faculty of education. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire and were analysed quantitatively. The findings show that respondents understand what sexual harassment means. The findings furthermore reveal that sexual harassment is prevalent at the case study university; the biggest problem is evident in students who have had to repeat modules due to their refusal of the attentions of sex-seeking lecturers. The results of the study indicate that incidents of sexual harassment are seldom reported adequately by victims, as these would rather be discussed among females. Implications of sexual harassment are discussed and recommendations are made on how to address sexual harassment

The ASOS Surgical Risk Calculator: development and validation of a tool for identifying African surgical patients at risk of severe postoperative complications

Background: The African Surgical Outcomes Study (ASOS) showed that surgical patients in Africa have a mortality twice the global average. Existing risk assessment tools are not valid for use in this population because the pattern of risk for poor outcomes differs from high-income countries. The objective of this study was to derive and validate a simple, preoperative risk stratification tool to identify African surgical patients at risk for in-hospital postoperative mortality and severe complications. Methods: ASOS was a 7-day prospective cohort study of adult patients undergoing surgery in Africa. The ASOS Surgical Risk Calculator was constructed with a multivariable logistic regression model for the outcome of in-hospital mortality and severe postoperative complications. The following preoperative risk factors were entered into the model; age, sex, smoking status, ASA physical status, preoperative chronic comorbid conditions, indication for surgery, urgency, severity, and type of surgery. Results: The model was derived from 8799 patients from 168 African hospitals. The composite outcome of severe postoperative complications and death occurred in 423/8799 (4.8%) patients. The ASOS Surgical Risk Calculator includes the following risk factors: age, ASA physical status, indication for surgery, urgency, severity, and type of surgery. The model showed good discrimination with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.805 and good calibration with c-statistic corrected for optimism of 0.784. Conclusions: This simple preoperative risk calculator could be used to identify high-risk surgical patients in African hospitals and facilitate increased postoperative surveillance. © 2018 British Journal of Anaesthesia. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Medical Research Council of South Africa gran

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press