Distributed manufacturing even at the household level is now well established with the combined use of open source designs and self-replicating rapid prototyper (RepRap) 3-D printers. Previous work has shown substantial economic consumer benefits for producing their own polymer products. Now flexible filaments are available at roughly 3-times the cost of more conventional 3-D printing materials. To provide some insight into the potential for flexible filament to be both technically feasible a...
This paper investigates the effect of smallholder livestock production on income among farm households in northern Ghana. Questionnaires were administered to 300 household heads and ordinary least squares estimation technique was applied to the dataset. The dependent variable was income and measured by total annual income received from farm and non-farm activities by household heads. The independent variable of interest was tropical livestock unit measured by flock size. We also included farm...
This study is undertaken to verify if the Ricardian Equivalence Hypothesis (REH) hold for Nigeria and Ghana using annual time-series data of both developing countries covering from 1970 to 2013; and taking previous empirical studies as its point of reference and departure. The broad objective of the study is dissected into the following specific objectives of the study as thus: to examine the effects of budget deficits on interest rates, inflation, and economic growth in Nigeria and Ghana wit...
Using time series such as GDP per capita, solid minerals output, foreign trade balance, domestic interest rate, inflation, and gross domestic savings, for the period 1960-2015. the Linear Growth Regression model adopted for this study indicates that solid minerals positively impact on sustainable growth and is statistically significant. The study also found that solid mineral is highly significant but negatively related with foreign exchange due largely to illegal migration of mineral commodi...
This study was necessary since inflation and unemployment are twin macroeconomic variables that exert influence on policy decision of any economy. Using time series from 1972 to 2015, the Ordinary Least Squares method was employed to determine both the short-run and long-run Phillips curve and ascertain if it is evident in Nigeria. The non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) was also estimated. The results establish the presence of negative relationship both inflation and unem...
This study adopts the Lerman and Yitzhaki approach to measure progressivity and re-ranking effects in health care financing in South East Nigeria. Result supports the existence of regressive healthcare payments. Households that spend more to healthcare financing are unable to maintain their original social status due to net income declining below prepayment income. This could certainly be catastrophic as it takes a huge proportion of the household's income, leaving households with insignifica...
It has been argued that public expenditure on education and health is a veritable tool in improving human capabilities. Expenditure on these sectors is categorized into recurrent and capital. While capital expenditure can go a long way in enhancing the productivity capacity, recurrent expenditure is for non-productive activities. Available statistics however shows that in Nigeria, emphasis has been on recurrent expenditure at the detriment of capital expenditure. This study therefore employed...
It has been enunciated that it is possible to reduce the size of the sacrifice ratio in an economy without a corresponding increase in the rate of inflation. Besides, for the Nigerian economy, there are issues relating to the inflation-output relationship, among which is how inflation inertia impacts on output and unemployment. It is therefore apt to ascertain what Nigeria’s sacrifice ratio could be after many successful inflation reductions over the years. Adopting the Instrumental Variabl...
In fiscal economics, tax has been recognized as veritable instrument in generating revenue and stabilizing growth. However, to determine if a country has made efforts at increasing tax revenue over a period, tax performance in the dynamic sense which measures the sensitivity and response of the tax revenue in relation to GDP is imperative. Motivated by this, we adopted the buoyancy approach to examine Tax revenue-GDP relationship using Nigeria data. This is to ascertain if the government is k...
Health care services in Nigeria are mainly financed through out-of-pocket payment. This study investigated the extent to which payments towards health care are related to ability to pay and if poor households make proportionally more out-of-pocket payment on health. In analyzing this, the study utilized data from the General household survey of the National Bureau of statistics of 2014. The study employed the Kakwani progressivity index in analyzing the objectives of the study. The findin...
In the face of continuous rise in price of essential commodities arising from the 2015-2016 currency crises which led to the introduction of different policies to tame the ugly tide, this paper analyzes the distributional impacts of the resulting prices on household welfare using two rounds of household data and commodity prices generated from National Bureau of Statistics Using pre-crisis post crises information and adopting Deaton and Muellbauer (1980) and Friedman & Levinson (2002) framewo...
The need for African countries to improve tax revenue-GDP ratio has open up debate among policy makers. This study is motivated to analyse the impact of tax revenue, direct and indirect tax on economic growth of ECOWAS countries, using Seemingly Unrelated Regression Estimate (SURE) analysis for five selected Economic Community of West African States (Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Benin and Burkina Faso) using data from 2000-2015 generated from World Bank World Development Indicators, 2016. Fi...
In this study, attempt has been made to measure the welfare impact of public expenditure on primary health care services in rural Nigeria employing the benefit-incidence approach. Primary and secondary data were generated from various health care centres and samples selected from various localities in Ika South Local Government Area of Delta state. From the sample selected, households were decomposed into non-poor, moderately poor and core poor. An analysis of the data depicts that the no...
This study aims at ascertaining the relationship between welfare and economic growth in Nigeria, capturing both economic and environmental welfare. Nitrous oxide emission and Carbon dioxide emission in Nigeria are used to capture environmental welfare while government education expenditure, per capita health expenditure and per capita income are used to capture economic welfare. Using quarterly data spanning 1999-2016 and employing the cointegration analysis as well as the Ordinary Least Squa...
It is argued that while increase in budgetary allocation to social services is highly desirable, it is not sufficient to guarantee enhancement in better health outcome. This paper links public health expenditure, economic growth and health outcomes and the causality among them using Nigeria data. The finding suggests increase in public health expenditure has decreased infant mortality rate while infant mortality rate is negatively correlated with economic growth. Interestingly, the direction ...