This paper argues that the increasing adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is a factor that improves the terms of trade of sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies. According to new theories of international trade, ICTs can change the terms of trade by increasing productivity, reducing costs, and increasing human capital endowment and specialization. Here, we use World Development Indicators (WDI) and United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) data over the period from 2005 to 2017 and a vector autoregression (VAR) model on a panel of 39 SSA countries to illustrate the importance of ICTs in this regard. Our results show that the change in the terms-of-trade index is positively affected by the change in the number of internet users as a percentage of mobile phone subscribers in SSA. Furthermore, an impulse response function shows that a shock that would increase the number of internet users by 10 percent of mobile phone subscribers would result in the terms-of-trade index gains of more than 5% within about a year.
This paper examines the determinants of children's schooling under imperfect credit market conditions in Cameroon, with a particular focus on the role of monetary and non-monetary shocks. Households that are more vulnerable to shocks have a greater incentive to build up a buffer stock to protect themselves against unforeseen negative shocks, and keeping children out of school may be part of such a strategy. The study uses microeconomic data from the fourth Cameroonian Household Survey (ECAM IV) conducted in 2014 by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) and an instrumental variable Probit model to demonstrate its point. The results show that uncertainty about household income as measured by transitory income and declining household income decrease the probability of children attending school in Cameroon. The same is true for increasing household size. Nevertheless, access to the credit market is a factor of household resilience to shocks.Classification JEL: E24, I21, I31, O15.
This article aims to identify the sources of inequalities in pregnant women's access to essential medicines in Cameroon. We mobilize data from the fifth Cameroon Demographic and Health Survey (CDHS) (2018), conducted by the National Institute of Statistics (INS). After measuring the degree of inequality through the concentration index, we used the decomposition method of Wagstaff et al. (2003). The results show that the CI calculations by groups of individuals reveal the existence of important determinants of inequality in access to essential medicines to the disadvantage of pregnant women in poor households and contribute to shares that vary between 24.25% and 69.57%. The factors that contribute most to reducing these inequalities are the level of education, insurance coverage and marital status of pregnant women at 69.57%, 56.81% and 22.33% respectively. In other words, if wealth had been distributed equally, inequalities in pregnant women's access to essential medicines would remain largely due to inequalities related to education, insurance uptake and marital status of pregnant women.
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