It is an established fact that the Covid-19 pandemic had a persistent economic uncertainty effect than health uncertainty. In this study, the researchers examined the effects of expanding sales online on the financial resilience of enterprises in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) during the economic downturn. The researchers measured financial resilience by the extent of sales and cash-flows decline during the pandemic. The researchers collected 4751 unweighted data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey and it Covid-19 follow-up survey. Findings from the bivariate probit model and the predictive margin probabilities showed that most enterprises in SSA adopted or expanded proportion of sales online during the pandemic. Increasing the proportion of online sales exerted a decreasing effect on sales and cash-flow declines and thus improved financial resilience at a threshold of 40% during the pandemic. Large enterprises were observed to be more resilient than small and medium enterprises, yet domestic and foreign enterprises had the same level of financial resilience during the pandemic. For enterprises in Africa to realise the 40% threshold of online sales, the researchers encourage enterprises to invest in advertisement for product legitimacy.
One of the issues in economics which has continued to receive profound attention is fiscal management. This is because it is believed that the quality of the fiscal management within a given economy has far reaching implications for the health of that economy. In developing countries especially, fiscal policy and management have persistently undermined their growth and development prospects. This study aims at adding to the existing knowledge on fiscal behaviors, using the Ghanaian situation, particularly identifying the effects of the government borrowing modes on government spending and revenue mobilization behaviour by proposing that the effects of the borrowing modes on the revenue streams may not necessarily be the same. The study modifies the Franco-Rodriguez government utility maximization function and employs the vector autoregressive (VAR) system to establish the dynamic links among the borrowing modes, the revenue channels and government spending. Two variants of the model-aggregated and disaggregated government expenditure models are analyzed. Whilst one long run equilibrium relationship is uncovered in respect of government consumption expenditure for the disaggregated model, in the aggregate government expenditure model, two long run relationships are established for government expenditure and external borrowing. The long run estimates for government consumption expenditure indicate that it is inversely related to government capital expenditure, direct taxes, indirect taxes and domestic borrowing. In the short run, we discover that the impacts of the borrowing modes on the tax channels are different and it is recommended that in looking at how to manage the responses of these tax channels to borrowing, tax policy initiators take this into account in fashioning appropriate policies.
The phenomenon of inflation is one of the most widely discussed economic issues across the world and for this reason has continued to remain very relevant and visible within the policy domain. This is because it affects the economic fortunes of the principal actors within the economy from the low to the high income. This study adds to the existing literature on inflation by identifying the short and long run factors which influence its trajectory in the Ghanaian economy. The study adopts the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to comprehensively establish the long and short run determinants of inflation based on the data set spanning from 1979 to 2016 and the empirical analysis shows that price level is in the long run significantly determined by food crop production, crude oil prices, population, output of goods and services and money supply but in the short run the only variable which does not impact significantly on the price level variable is the interest rate proxied by the policy rate. It is also established that the system is able to correct about 60% of the deviations from its equilibrium position in every quarter. The main recommendation that emanates from the study is that policy makers instead of dealing with inflation mainly from the orthodox monetary perspective must also begin to pay more attention to the supply side issues in the economy.
This study departs from focusing on the level of tax relief utilization by focusing on the factors contributing to the low trends and how utilization of personal tax relief can influence tax evasion from the premises of the Allingham-Sandmo (A-S) theory. This study considered respondents working within the formal sector of Ghana. Data was collected through the use of questionnaire after the stratified sampling technique was used to select 136,131 respondents across service, industry and agricultural formal sectors in the country. The study identified a low level of awareness of the personal tax reliefs and the factors that contributed to this were ignorance of the existence of personal reliefs; frustration in filling the tax relief/returns forms; the cost of assessing the reliefs which outweighs the benefits and avoidance of contradictory personal information. It was also identified that, utilization of the tax relief can result in the prevention of tax evasion. It is recommended that, a sound education of taxpayers in focal areas of the tax system is needed especially in the various HR units during the initial stages of employing staffs. Also, the reliefs should be simple to claim through the use of computerized systems and finally, there should be an upward review of the reliefs to motivate taxpayers.
Global concerns have over the years, been raised over the impact that business operations have on the environment. In response to these growing concerns, companies have begun to provide comprehensive disclosures on the environmental and social impact of their business operations. In this study, we sought to review the trends in disclosure practices as well as examine the extent to which companies are complying with the sustainability reporting guidelines in Ghana. The contextual data from the Akoben special audit on industrial operations supplemented with face-to-face interviews with important stakeholder groups served as the main data source for the study. The findings of this study showed that, even though the general trend in the environmental disclosures has increased over-time, the overall performance ratings of business operations did not meet the standards required for environmental disclosures. Based on the findings, we recommend that in the design and implementation of the rating programme, a broad consultation and active participation of all stakeholder groups must be encouraged to ensure the effectiveness of the programme. Additionally, the regulatory institutions need to be adequately resource by the government in order to strengthen their enforcement and monitoring roles.
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