Malaria is considered endemic in over hundred countries across the globe. Many cases of malaria and deaths due to malaria occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. The disease is of great public health concern since it affects people of all age groups more especially pregnant women and children because of their vulnerability. This study sought to use vector autoregression (VAR) models to model the impact of climatic variability on malaria. Monthly climatic data (rainfall, maximum temperature, and relative humidity) from 2010 to 2015 were obtained from the Ghana Meteorological Agency while data on malaria for the same period were obtained from the Ghana Health Service. Results of the Granger and instantaneous causality tests led to a conclusion that malaria is influenced by all three climatic variables. The impulse response analyses indicated that the highest positive effect of maximum temperature, relative humidity, and rainfall on malaria is observed in the months of September, March, and October, respectively. The decomposition of forecast variance indicates varying degree of malaria dependence on the climatic variables, with as high as 12.65% of the variability in the trend of malaria which has been explained by past innovations in maximum temperature alone. This is quite significant and therefore, policy-makers should not ignore temperature when formulating policies to address malaria.
In this paper, we assessed volatility of Ghana's inflation rates for 2000 to 2018 using the auto-regressive conditionally heteroskedasticity (ARCH), generalized ARCH (GARCH), and the exponential GARCH (EGARCH) models. The inflation data were obtained from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS). The proposed model should be able to provide projections of inflation volatility from 2019 and beyond. The results showed that higher order models are required to properly explain Ghana's inflation volatility and the EGARCH(12, 1) is the best fitting model for the data. The EGARCH(12, 1) model is robust to model and forecast volatility of inflation rates. Also, the results suggest that we are forecasting increasing volatility and there is increasing trend in general prices of goods and services for 2018 and beyond. The forecasts figures revealed that Ghana's economy is likely to be unstable in 2018 and 2019. This study therefore recommends that policy makers and industry players need to put in place stringent monetary and fiscal policies that would put the anticipated increase in inflation under control. The models were implemented using R software.
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