Cocoa farmers face many drawbacks to their socioeconomic progress. A vivid example is the cocoa swollen shoot virus disease (CSSVD) which has caused mass destruction to many cocoa-growing areas like the Western North Region, where a larger portion of over 60% of Ghana's cocoa was produced. This study set out to find the effect of the CSSVD on the living standards of cocoa farmers in Ghana. A structured questionnaire was administered to elicit information from all 386 cocoa farming households of the study community in the study area, the epicenter of the disease. The study employed a Multidimensional Poverty Index as a measure of the farmers' welfare and estimated the simultaneous equation tobit model (Newey's two-step estimation) to find the socioeconomic implication of the disease on the cocoa farmers. The outcome of the study indicates that the CSSV disease as the main variable significantly affects the living standards of the cocoa farming households multidimensionally. This implies that the disease's incidence reduces crop yield leading to low resources, thereby adversely affecting households' welfare. Occupational diversity, educational level of the household head, knowledge of the disease, cocoa land size, households that had migrated to the study area, those that employ an external labour force, the log of household's expenditure, number of household members, age of households' head, access to farm water and participation off-farm activities were statistically significant on the depth of multidimensional poverty of the households. As policy measures, formal education and education on the disease's awareness should be intensified through frequent engagement with agriculture extension officers who will teach the farmers how to handle the disease. As a measure to alleviate multidimensional poverty, the use of external labour force should be encouraged for large-scale production. Finally, cocoa farmer households are to diversify to mitigate the impact of crop disease.

This study examines how the district assemblies’ common fund grant is distributed among the local governments in Ghana to ascertain the objectivity of the sharing formula scheme created under the 1992 Constitution. The dynamic GMM panel estimation approach is employed for the empirical analysis with focus on new versus mature democracy and how swing and aligned districts tend to benefit from the distribution. Annual data on the fund disbursements and the election outcomes from 1994 to 2018 for 216 district assemblies is used. The findings reveal that average transfers to each district was Gh?7.54 million which generally increased by 9.4 percent in election years reflecting the opportunistic behavior of incumbent governments. Swing districts benefited more from the increase than non-swing districts, as the former received 4.3 percent more than the latter. Aligned districts in new democracy received, 2 percent more than non-aligned ones, while it was 4.3 percent more for swing districts in mature democracy. Therefore, the allocation formula is subject to political manipulations hence it is recommended that the unilateral appointment of the fund’s administrator by incumbent Presidents be reviewed in addition to creating autonomous public agencies to be responsible for the allocation formula and the fund administration independently.

The role of agriculture in Ghana’s economic development cannot be overstated as it is a major contributor to GDP and employs more people in the rural areas thereby improving on their welfare. However, the sector’s performance in recent time has declined as poverty incidence has remained high among rural agriculture households. This study, therefore, examines how participation in agriculture activities impact households’ welfare in Ghana using the seventh edition of Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) dataset conducted in 2016/2017. The Heckman probit model is applied to determine the drivers of households' probability of engaging in agriculture. The propensity scores matching technique is used to match the farming households to their replica non-farming households as counterfactuals to ascertain the welfare impact of the households. The result shows that the welfare of households in agriculture is multidimensionally deprived than non-agriculture households. In addition, factors such as size of household, sex and age of household head, age at first marriage, location, ethnicity, and educational level of household heads have the likelihood of influencing agriculture participation in Ghana. Therefore, by modernising agriculture to enhance value addition through technology, irrigation, financing and marketing to boost agribusinesses would enhance the welfare in the agriculture households.

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