Adoption and risk of mobile financial services: a case of some selected municipalities in Eastern Cape Province
- Authors: Aderibigbe, Ifeoluwa A.I
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Mobile commerce Finance
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/13281 , vital:39630
- Description: The study investigated risk and adoption of mobile financial services among some users in selected municipalities within the Eastern Cape Province, using the theory of reason action, technology acceptance model and the theory of expected utility and risk aversion to explain the variables. Moreover, the explanatory research design and quantitative data collection approach formed the methodology adopted in the study. In addition, a validated semistructured interview questionnaire was used as a research instrument in the study. The multistage, stratify, purposive and convenience sampling techniques were applied to select 6 research sites and 386 research participants for the study. Three research objectives were stated and tested using descriptive, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to profile the risk and logit regression statistics. The results of statistical analysis show different level of cross tabulation between MFS and education level, all the 6 different locations, individual age range, job type, and average income of individual. Analysis revealed that age and income level of individuals have the highest relationship with the use of MFS. The statistical analysis used was the logistic regression. Pool of effort of all the stake holders in financial services sector should focus on including the low income earners and the technology should be simple enough for the use of the older generation.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Financial development, income inequality and poverty: case of a selected SADC countries
- Authors: Leve, Samkele
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Finance Economic development Income distribution
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/16918 , vital:40785
- Description: The financial sector plays a pivotal role in an economy of a country; hence the importance of financial development cannot be underestimated. Financial development is widely regarded as another conduit through which income inequality and poverty can be alleviated, however both theoretical and empirical literature does not reach consensus on the effect of financial development on income inequality and poverty. Against this background, the study empirically examines the effect of financial development on income inequality and poverty in selected Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, employing the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) technique for the period 1980 to 2011. Based on the inequalitydecreasing and Mckinnon Conduit effect, two models which link financial sector development and inequality and financial sector development and poverty were estimated using five different dimensions of financial development. Empirical results revealed that financial development overall does have an impact on income inequality and poverty in the selected SADC countries. An interesting observation from the empirical results is that the actual dimension of financial development plays a significant role in determining the relationship between financial development, income inequality and poverty in the SADC region. The impact of financial depth on poverty is not obvious in the study, depending on the variable used. On the relationship between financial system stability, income inequality and poverty, results reveal that a stable financial system is beneficial to the poor. Financial efficiency does not appear to have a significant role in reducing income inequality and poverty in the selected SADC countries. Overall, the findings from the study indicate that financial access or financial inclusion and financial stability is what reduces poverty instead of mere financial sector development at a broader level.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Public health expenditure and economic development: the case of South Africa
- Authors: Hlotywa, Anathi
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Public health -- South Africa -- Finance Public health -- Economic aspects -- South Africa Medical economics
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/13491 , vital:39673
- Description: Literature shows that there is a relationship between health expenditure and a country’s level of development. The labour productivity depends on health and the level of education of the employees. Given this background, the study’s main objective was to examine the impact of public healthcare expenditure on economic development in South Africa for the period 1996- 2016 utilising the Autoregressive Distributed lag Model. The empirical results show that there is a positive relationship between Public Health Expenditure and Human development Index. This shows that an increase in government expenditure on health increases economic development in South Africa. The results are consistent with other previous studies such as Wang (2015) and Riayati and Unaidah (2016). The study recommends that the government should increase public health expenditure. This will increase economic development. The government can do this by building hospitals and rolling out more funds to improve the healthcare in South Africa. The study also recommends that the government should reduce unemployment. Unemployment has been seen to have an undesirable impact on economic development
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- Date Issued: 2019
Regional Financial Integration and Financial Sector Development in the Southern African Development Community
- Authors: Ntlemeza, Lwando
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Integrating national economies
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/13870 , vital:39720
- Description: Regional financial integration (RFI) is perceived as the other avenue through which the financial sector of member countries can develop given the vast benefits which associated with it. These benefits include mobilization and allocation of efficient resources to productive sectors within the region which plays a very important role in the development process. Given this background, the study examines how regional financial integration promotes financial sector development in the SADC region utilizing the panel data model for the period 1996 to 2015. The empirical results revealed that regional financial integration does have an impact on the financial sector development in the member countries in the region. Furthermore, the results showed that regional financial integration require a certain degree of institutional quality for RFI benefits to accrue. The empirical results imply that the countries in the SADC region should pursue regional financial integration. This can be achieved through commitment by all authorities in the region. There should be a firm commitment to broader economic integration and building on existing networks and build the necessary infrastructure.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Teacher practices and human capital acquisition: evidence from the international association for evaluation of educational achievement
- Authors: Tsikai,Epiphania
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Human capital Academic achievement
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/17011 , vital:40811
- Description: Human capital is considered as the measure of education, skills, capacity and attributes of labour which impact people’s productive capacity and earning potential. The study used mathematics student academic performance as a proxy to measure human capital across countries using the Trends in International Mathematics and Science study (TIMSS) dataset. African countries participating in TIMSS are performing poorly as they are always at the bottom. The budget allocation of African countries is more than that of Asian countries, but the student outcomes do not correlate with the input. This is so disappointing considering the amount of money the governments invest in the education sectors. The study investigated teacher practices and human capital acquisition in four African countries that participated in TIMSS from 2007 to 2015. The four countries were South Africa, Botswana, Egypt and Morocco. In addition, the study included the best performing countries from East Asia that also participated in TIMSS. These four countries were Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong Sar. The best performing countries were included in the analysis in order to determine best practice from the best performing countries. Using Stata 14, pooled OLS cross sections methodology was used to generate results on whether teacher practices influence students’ mathematics achievement by using grade 8 test scores per country, student and teacher background. The study found that some teacher practices significantly explain academic performance in mathematics especially in African countries whilst socio economic status significantly affect performance across all the countries. Future research will investigate some other measures that can promote good performance of mathematics in African countries.
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- Date Issued: 2019
The Impact of capital structure on performance of banks in South Africa
- Authors: Jiza, Andiswa Abongile
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Banks and banking Capital management and capital structure
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/16895 , vital:40783
- Description: The study examined the relationship between capital structure and bank performance in South Africa using five small banks and the two big banks from 2002-2017. Fixed effects model, Pooled and the random effects model were utilised to test the relationship between capital structure and bank performance. Return on assets and the earnings per share were used as a measure for financial performance while the debt to equity ratio and the debt to assets ratio were used as proxies for capital structure. The results show that there is a negative significant relationship between return on assets and the two capital structure measures meaning that higher leverage ratios lead to lower profits measured by return on assets. while there is a negative significant relationship between earnings per share and the capital structure meaning that higher leverage ratios lead to lower profits. The study recommends that financial managers of banks should maintain lower debt than equity in their mix of capital structure as more debts is not good for the performance of banks.
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- Date Issued: 2019
The impact of public health expenditure on health outcomes in South Africa
- Authors: Hlafa, Besuthu
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Health services administration
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/13381 , vital:39639
- Description: Health holds an important position in maintainable economic development since it is both a prerequisite for and an outcome of economic development. This means that health contributes hugely to the attainment of sustainable development and health outcomes. The importance of health is demonstrated in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) where three of the eight goals are aimed at improving health outcomes. Despite progress made by other middle-income countries in achieving health-related MDGs, South Africa still has worse health outcomes and experiences a challenge in attaining positive outcomes for these goals (Coovadia et al., 2009; Malaudzi 2016). This study’s main focus was to identify the association between public health expenditure and health outcomes in South Africa’s nine provinces from 2002 to 2016. The study implemented fixed effects and a random effects panel data estimation technique to control for time effects and individual province heterogeneity. This was followed by employing the Hausman specification test to identify the fixed effects model as the appropriate estimator for the study. The study also employed the seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) model and the least squares dummy variable (LSDV) model to examine the impact of public health expenditure on each province separately. The findings from the study elucidated that the relationship between public health expenditure and health outcomes in South Africa varied across provinces depending provincial management and infrastructure availability.
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- Date Issued: 2019
The nexus between capital inflows and credit growth in South Africa
- Authors: Davani, Siviwe
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Capital movements Credit
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/16885 , vital:40782
- Description: This study examines the effect of capital inflows on credit growth on the South African economy. Capital inflows ease the constraint of the low domestic savings in the domestic economy. The study employed the Structural Vector Auto Regression model to analyse the relationship between the variables of interest. The findings of the study indicate that the two types of capital inflows employed in the study, Foreign Direct Investment and Foreign Portfolio investment have a significant effect on credit growth in the long-run. The results also indicate that there are other important factors such as macroeconomic stability and political stability which have a significant effect of capital inflows into South Africa. Overall, the results revealed that a greater variation of credit growth is explained by GDP. This indicates that there is a link between GDP and FDI and FPI given their link with credit growth. These results also suggest that the foreign capital channel can be another channel which may affect growth in the domestic economy in the event that there are negative innovations which affects capital flows to South Africa. The study thus suggests that policies which ensures macroeconomic stability and political stability should be pursued given their influence on capital inflows into South Africa. Also it’s recommended that the country mobilise domestic resources to ensure sustainable development
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- Date Issued: 2019
The residuality of agriculture and the time dimensions of rural employment in South Africa
- Authors: Ngqwala, Sixolile
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Rural poor -- Employment
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MCom (Economics)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/16985 , vital:40806
- Description: There has been increasing recognition in the past few decades that rural households in developing countries are not limited to the agricultural sector, but also depend on other, nonagricultural activities. Rural households are understood to pursue multiple livelihood strategies which involve juggling different economic pursuits as a means of reducing risk and maintaining options. In South Africa, the importance of multiple livelihood strategies is widely appreciated, on the other hand there is a common perception in policy circles that agricultural development can become an important route out of poverty, for instance as part-time small-scale farmers become larger and more commercialised. The purpose of this dissertation is to attempt to better understand the relationship between households’ participation in agriculture and nonagricultural activities. The point of departure is the observation that there is a great deal of flux into and out of agriculture in a way that is difficult to understand in terms of prevailing theories and frameworks. The study makes use of four waves of data from the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), and employs a variety of analytical approaches, including transition matrices, multinomial logistic regression, and panel data econometric models. The findings are mixed. In the one hand, there is evidence that households enter agriculture as other income sources become available, and leave agriculture again when those sources dry up. On the other hand, there is also evidence that participation in agriculture compensates for the absence or loss of other income sources, in which case agriculture can be thought of as a ‘residual’ sector that is activated when other options fail.
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- Date Issued: 2019