Agriculture plays an important role in terms of employment and its contribution to gross domestic product in many African countries. Thus, any policy initiative targeted towards poverty reduction in Africa should consider the agricultural sector as the major priority area. Unfortunately, the...

We believe the massive rural electrification, which began in 1992, played a significant role in the varying fertility rates across rural Ghana. Rural households with electricity, tend to have fewer children ever born to a woman than households without electricity. Using control function...

In this study, we combine the latent class stochastic frontier model with the complex time decay model to form a single-stage approach that accounts for unobserved technological differences to estimate efficiency and the determinants of efficiency. In this way, we contribute to the literature by...

This paper presents a review of the current debt problem in Ghana and assesses whether debt relief under the HIPC initiative can be effectively translated into poverty reduction. The extent of the debt burden is jeopardizing Ghana’s effort at poverty reduction. The evidence suggests that debt...

There has been significant amount of aid inflows to developing countries including Ghana, but these have been very volatile. Aid flows have been associated with low domestic resource mobilization and have reduced Ghana to a country heavily dependent on aid. The amount of official development...

Ghana’s tax reforms constitute the major policy instrument needed to accelerate growth and poverty reduction. Over the past two decades, the government has consistently spent more revenue than it is able to generate and the gap is often financed with foreign aid which has perpetuated the...

The paper primarily investigates the interrelationship between financial sector development and poverty reduction in Ghana. This is done using time-series data from the World Development Indicators from 1970-2001. The main findings are, first, that even though financial sector development does...

Purpose: This paper examines the effect of external debt on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in view of an upsurge in the level of external debt in many countries on the continent. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses annual data for 39 SSA countries from 1990 to 2013 and...

This study attempts to provide some understanding about SMEs' access to finance within the West African sub-region with particular interest in establishing whether there are similarities and/or differences in the determinants of SMEs access to finance across countries in SSA. For robustness...

We present the results of an experiment involving established couples, which uses choices between lotteries to test some economic models of household decision-making. Subjects make choices individually and jointly and are asked to make predictions about their partners choices. Income pooling is...