This paper studies the effect of health care expenditure on health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) using data from 1995 to 2018 for 45 countries. It uses fixed effects and generalized methods of moments estimation approaches for the analysis. The paper measures health care expenditure using three proxies: namely, total health care expenditure per capita, public health care expenditure to gross domestic product (GDP), and private health care expenditure to total health expenditure. Health outcomes are measured by child health outcomes (under-5 mortality rate) and life expectancy. The results show that increase in health care expenditure as measured by total health care expenditure per capita and public health care expenditure to GDP leads to decline in under-5 mortality rates. The results also show that total health care expenditure per capita leads to an increase in life expectancy. The study therefore recommends that governments in SSA increase budget allocations towards the health care sector to achieve better health outcomes.

Eritrea, a relatively young African nation, is one of the least developed countries in the world. Its economy is predominantly dependent on subsistence agriculture and the level and magnitude of poverty is more severe in rural areas. The formal financial sector is underdeveloped, state-owned, far from being competitive, and limited in terms of depth and breadth as measured by the relevant financial sector development indicators. To address the limitations of the formal banking sector and to help fill the financing gap, and improve the general livelihood of those at the lower income group, the Government of Eritrea introduced a Saving and Microcredit Programme (SMCP) in 1996 for which no scientific study measuring its impact has been done at the household level. The study was conducted in rural areas to find out whether the SMCP as a microfinance institution has improved the livelihood of its clients. The specific objectives of the study were to describe the characteristic feature of rural livelihoods in terms of the resources owned, the strategies pursued and outcomes achieved, identify and examine the determinants of household participation in the SMCP and finally assess the impact of participation in SMCP on household livelihoods. The study employed a quasi-experimental cross-sectional survey design involving structured and semistructured questionnaire administered to 500 respondents of whom 200 represented the treated group and 300 the controlled group. Logit regression was employed to identify the factors that determine household participation in the SMCP. In regard to this, age of the client household, household size, marital status, level of education of the client household, the size of first round loan, entrepreneurial experience, type of loan product offered by the institution, ownership of livestock and microenterprise, the perception of the client on involuntary deposits, the occurrence of a negative events (shock) to the household and village access to electricity were found to have statistically significant effect on the household"s probability to participate in the SMCP. Furthermore, the marginal effects were also computed to evaluate the contribution of each of these factors to the likelihood of participating in the SMCP. A propensity score matching model was applied to assess the impact of the programme on the livelihood of its clients. The findings reveal that participation in the SMCP has a significantly higher average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) households.Profits generated from off-farm and small microenterprises, the values of household and livestock assets, food and non-food consumption expenditures and nutrition quality, were ii found to be on average higher for the treated households than for the controlled households.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the effect of fiscal policy variables on economic growth in South Africa. The fiscal policy variables considered in the study include government gross fixed capital formation, tax expenditure and government consumption expenditure as well as budget deficit. The study covered the period 1990 to 2004. Quarterly data was used in the estimation with the aid of vector regressive modeling technique and impulse response functions. The outcome supports four key conclusions. First, government consumption expenditure has a significant positive effect on economic growth. Gross fixed capital formation from government also has a positive impact on output growth but the size of the impact is less than that attained by consumption expenditure. Tax receipts also have a positive effect on output growth. However, the size of the deficit seems to have no significant impact on growth outcomes.

The study aimed to examine the relationship between financial development and health care expenditure in 46 Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) countries. The paper argues that health care expenditure is a key transmission mechanism through which financial development influences better health outcomes. The study used random and fixed effects as well as instrumental variable estimation methods using data from 1995 to 2014. The results showed that financial development leads to increased health care expenditure. In terms of policy implications, the findings underscore the need to foster financial development in SSA economies to assist with domestic resource mobilisation to finance health care expenditure.

Abstract:This paper examines the exchange rate pass-through to import, producer and consumer prices in South Africa using monthly data covering the period 2000M1 to 2009M5. The study uses innovation accounting tools (impulse response and variance decomposition) within the framework of an unrestricted VAR to examine the degree of pass-through as well as the relative importance of a number of variables in explaining changes in domestic prices. The key fi ndings suggest that after 1 per cent shock to nominal effective exchange rate, the level of CPI increases by 0.125 per cent, giving a pass-through elasticity of 13 per cent. However, the pass-through elasticity of producer price is 20 per cent after 24 months suggesting that favourable shocks to producer price infl ation can have considerable moderating effect on CPI infl ation.