This paper examines the determinants and policy implications of active and healthy ageing in Sub-Saharan Africa, taking the case of Bamenda, in Cameroon. Specifically, the study sought to identify and explore the determinants of active and healthy ageing using a mixed-methods approach involving qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. Focus group discussions were conducted complemented by a survey (random and snowball sampling) using a structured questionnaire. Narratives and thematic analysis were used to analyze the data generated from the focus group discussion and Tobit regression was employed to analyze the multiple determinants of active ageing by dimensions and on a global scale in Cameroon. Results identified three key dimensions of active and healthy ageing: employment/livelihood options (EL), community support and health (CH) and housing and living in Bamenda (HL). The regression results reveal gender bias in active ageing, a non-effect of education and health on active ageing, and a positive effect of income on active and healthy ageing. This study contributes, among others, to the competence–environmental press theory on active ageing with regards to unbundling context specific determinants of active and healthy ageing. It equally derives policy considerations with regards to gender mainstreaming and the identification of age friendly income earning options to enhance the active and healthy ageing process.
The aim of this study is to target poverty following a multidimensional approach. The Multiple Correspondence Analysis, the Pα class of poverty measures and the logistic regression permitted us to construct a Composite Welfare Index, to draw up multidimensional poverty profiles and to identify its determinants. The results show that, with regard to the spatial distribution, Cameroon's regions can be divided into three: an area of extreme multi-poverty, an area of non-multi-poverty, and an area in between. With regard to socio-economic characteristics, the residential area variable was found to be an absolute determinant. Monetary poverty is obviously considerable in this distribution, and so are existence poverty, infrastructural poverty and human poverty. Policies aimed at fighting poverty must target the areas of extreme multi-poverty and rural areas on the basis of shortages of capabilities in all these dimensions.
This paper is targeted objectives: to document the determinants of child health as informed by focus group discussion, to analyze what the people say concerning the relationship between child health and maternal labour force participation, to explore the perception of the people on the effects of child health on asset accumulation and to suggest public policies on the basis of the findings. We used seven focus groups to explore what the people say based on different health domains: access to public goods; inputs to health; benefits from better health; better child health and complementary activities; benefits of maternity leave and better child health, decision making concerning family health. Each focus group was made of eight participants: housewife, traders, farmers, drivers, teachers, technicians, medical personnel and military drawn from different religious groups: catholic, protestant mainline, protestant non-mainline, other protestant, Muslim, systemic and traditional belief. We observed that, parents make used of the extra time accrue to them due to better health for their children and family to do extra work that fetched them money. The increased family income is use to send their children to better schools, carter for their wellbeing as well as to promote asset growth and redistribution, thus, improving economic well-being and reducing poverty. In case of retirement or sudden retrenchment from the labour market, parents make use of the accumulated assets to increase their family income and maintain well-being, hence, reducing the psychological trauma on parents due to poverty. Based on these findings, we recommend that decision makers and actors concern with child health issues should considered, ease and promote child health outcomes. This is a key to narrowing the poverty and inequality gap between the poor and non-poor, rural and urban household residence, married and unmarried, employed and the unemployed, promote maternal labour force participation and household wealth accumulation in Cameroon.
Aim/purpose – This study examined the impact of public sector spending and govern- ance on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and further assessed the role of governance in the causal relationship between public sector spending and economic growth in the sub-region. Design/methodology/approach – The study employed the Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) estimator on data spanning the period 2002 to 2020 across a sample of 31 selected countries in SSA. To check for the robustness of the results, we adopted the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) panel non-causality test to detect Granger causality in the relationships among the variables. Findings – The findings show that spending in the public sectors alone, such as educa- tion and health, does not always yield the needed outcome of promoting economic growth. Government education expenditure stimulates economic growth in SSA, albeit the effect is statistically insignificant, whereas government health expenditure has a growth-limiting effect in SSA. The results reveal that government effectiveness, rule of law, political stability, and absence of violence/terrorism are among the governance indicators that can help to fast-track economic prosperity in SSA. However, the results further show that good governance can act as a stimulant to invigorate the effectiveness of public sector spending in achieving economic growth in SSA. The growth-enhancing complementary role of good governance to public sector spending is robust across all governance indicators except political stability for government education spending and regulatory quality for government health spending. Research implications/limitations – The findings imply that strengthening good gov- ernance in SSA is non-negotiable in managing and using public funds allocated to the public sectors and in achieving sustainable economic growth, poverty alleviation, and income inequality reduction in the sub-region. However, the findings of this study are limited to the SSA region and may not apply to other regions of the globe. Originality/value/contribution – The contribution of this paper is that it examines the moderation effect of governance in the causal relationship between public spending and economic growth in SSA while accounting for cross-sectional dependence. The paper also contributes to the existing literature by using disaggregated governance and public sector spending components to ascertain the robustness of the results and better inform policy. Keywords: education expenditure, economic growth, governance, health expenditure, panel-corrected standard errors estimation, public sector spending. JEL Classification: H, I, O.
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