Kwabena A. Kyei (Prof) - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Kwabena A. Kyei (Prof)
Europe PMC (PubMed Central), Oct 25, 2017
Studies on Ethno-Medicine, Dec 1, 2014
There has been a link between nutrition styles and human health and physical features for centuri... more There has been a link between nutrition styles and human health and physical features for centuries. Similarly, there has been a connection between the easiness and difficulty to reach food materials, and shortage and abundance of these material and human behaviors and moral structure. One of the efforts to make a connection between these qualifications comes from Ibn Khaldun. A thinker of Islam, Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the 18 th century, stated that moral characteristics and physical features in the communities which are deprived of food materials are higher than those of the communities having a wealthy living. According to him, overeating leads to the accumulation of harmful wastes in the body and thus to the deterioration of both physical and mental health of human being. Therefore, eating abundant food materials might not result in positive results for man. In the current study, it was investigated how the opportunities of reaching abundant food and types of nutrition affected human health in general and moral structure in Ibn Khaldun.
Journal of Human Ecology, 2015
The paper examined the effectiveness of public extension support for dryland smallholder grain pr... more The paper examined the effectiveness of public extension support for dryland smallholder grain producers. Both probability and non-probability sampling procedures were used to select districts, Local Agricultural Offices and farmers from 20 villages of Limpopo province, South Africa in January 2014. Data was collected from field-level extension agents and farmers using semi-structured questionnaires. Descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to analyze the data. Results show that most agents promoted conservation agriculture as a climate variability coping strategy. Furthermore, public extension support made a difference in farmers' yield over nonextension recipients' yields, though small. Forty percent of maize producers who received extension support bought extra maize meal for home consumption indicating maize yields from farmers' own production was insufficient to ensure household food security. Findings also suggest non-farming sources contributed more to respondents' household income than farming. Extension support, therefore, needs improvement to effectively support farmers' production in light of climate variability.
Journal of Human Ecology, 2015
Scarcity of food scientists in developing countries is a global and emerging critical problem req... more Scarcity of food scientists in developing countries is a global and emerging critical problem requiring efforts to address global food security. The perception and awareness of Food Science and Technology (FST) amongst the majority of high school learners (HSL) in Limpopo province was low at about 25 percent. The present study covered 1,539 high schools in all the five districts of Limpopo. A structured questionnaire was used to capture information from the HSL. The results show that there are significant differences in the awareness and knowledge of FST among the districts. Awareness in Sekhukhune district is 46 percent, while that in the other districts ranges from 18 percent to 25 percent. If developing continents, like Africa, are to overcome food insecurity, deliberate efforts need to be made to ascertain that FST, as a discipline, receives the proper image and boost in enrolment.
Journal of African Business, Jan 31, 2021
ABSTRACT The need for exchange markets coordination in Africa is rooted in the quest of most econ... more ABSTRACT The need for exchange markets coordination in Africa is rooted in the quest of most economic blocs to form a monetary union characterized by a single currency and has therefore attracted the attention of researchers. The intrinsic complexity of the exchange rate market hinders researchers from producing consistently good results. The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is a data-driven signal analysis method for nonlinear and nonstationary data. Empirical mode decomposition method can be used to divide nonlinear signal sequences into a group of well-behaved intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residue, so that we can compare the similarities. In this paper, EMD and ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), a modified version of EMD, are applied to the exchange rate market of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Through analyzing the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) of EMD and EEMD, we find the EEMD method to perform better on the orthogonality of IMFs than EMD. We propose a new way of analyzing short and long-run comovement through the analysis of the characteristics of IMFs and residue. The analysis of the IMFs and residue obtained from EEMD showed that exchange rate markets in SADC are driven by economic fundamentals and 12 out of 15 countries examined showed some level of similarity in the long-term trend. Our findings have implications for the direction of future SADC monetary union.
Journal of Economics and Finance, 2021
We used the detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA) method based on ensemble empirical mode d... more We used the detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA) method based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) to study the dynamic interdependence structure of daily domestic currency to US dollar exchange rates of 15 Southern African Development Community (SADC) exchange rate markets. We first decompose all series into intrinsic mode functions using EEMD and reconstruct the series into three frequency modes: high-, medium- and low frequency, and residue. The DCCA method was used to analyze the cross-correlation between the various frequencies, residues and original series. These were meant to address the nonlinearity and nonstationarity in observed exchange rate data. Finally, we formed a correlation network from the cross-correlation coefficients in all cases which revealed rich than would have been obtained from the original series. We observed similarities between the nature of cross-correlation between high-frequency series mimic the original series and the significant cross-correlation among the long-term trend of most SADC countries exchange rate markets. The innovation of this paper is to combine EEMD with DCCA to study the multifrequency cross-correlations of exchange rate markets, which can provide policymakers a deeper understanding of the dynamics of exchange rate markets toward the formation of currency unions.
South African Statistical Journal, 2021
We present the results of a simulation study performed to compare the accuracy of a lassotype pen... more We present the results of a simulation study performed to compare the accuracy of a lassotype penalization method and gradient boosting in estimating the baseline hazard function and covariate parameters in discrete survival models. The mean square error results reveal that the lasso-type algorithm performs better in recovering the baseline hazard and covariate parameters. In particular, gradient boosting underestimates the sizes of the parameters and also has a high false positive rate. Similar results are obtained in an application to real-life data.
IEEE Access, 2022
Price instability is a paramount concern since commodity prices are associated with the livelihoo... more Price instability is a paramount concern since commodity prices are associated with the livelihood and the economy of a nation as a whole; any extraordinary price fluctuation in the futures market shows that forecasts in commodities is an essential venture. The difficulties in predicting commodity prices are due to the unpredictability of the world's financial issues, fiscal dispensation, the speculative market's exacerbation, and several other elements. This study aims to model and forecast the market price of commodity futures. We applied decomposition techniques, empirical mode decomposition (EMD), and variational mode decomposition (VMD) to three commodities: corn, crude oil, and gold over the commodity spot market prices. We used the Granger causality test to establish mutual relationships amongst the three commodity futures prices. Three commodity price data with different periods were decomposed into several intrinsic modes. Using three forecasting performance evaluation criteria, statistical measures such as mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean percentage error (MAPE) to compare the capabilities of the suggested models. We also introduced Diebold Mariano (DM) test in selecting the optimal models for each commodity, since MAE, RMSE and MAPE have some shortcomings. We found that the combined models outperformed the individual back propagation neural network (BPNN) and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models in forecasting corn and crude oil futures prices series, while BPNN emerged as the optimal model for predicting gold futures prices series. Variational mode decomposition emerged as the ideal data pre-treatment method and contributed to enhancing the predicting ability of the BPNN and the ARIMA models. The empirical results showed that models combined with decomposition methods predict commodity futures prices accurately and can easily capture the volatility in commodity futures prices. INDEX TERMS Back propagation neural network, commodity price, empirical mode decomposition, forecasting, Granger causality test, variational mode decomposition. NOMENCLATURE ADMM Alternate direction method of multipliers MI Machine intelligence ARMA Autoregressive moving average BPNN Back-propagation neural network COMEX Commodity Exchange Inc EEMD Ensemble empirical mode decomposition EMD Empirical mode decomposition The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Amin Zehtabian .
The paper investigates the stationarity of eight indices on eight African stock markets. We revie... more The paper investigates the stationarity of eight indices on eight African stock markets. We review the extant literature on the stationarity of African stock markets and build on the works of Zhang et al. (2012) and Smith and Dyakova (2014). We use the non-linear ADF unit root test and the modified Wald type test under an ESTAR framework in our study. Our results show that both non-linear unit root tests fail to reject the null of unit root in all the markets but for Botswana. We infer from our results that the stock markets in Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia are non-stationary and hence weak-form efficient. Our work goes to agree with Choi and Moh (2007) who believe that, the presence of non-linear pattern in a data has no effect on the performance of a unit root test if the non-linear process is far from a unit root process.
Emerging stock markets are said to become efficient with time. This study seeks to investigate th... more Emerging stock markets are said to become efficient with time. This study seeks to investigate this assertion by analyzing long-memory persistence in 8 African stock markets covering the period from 28 August 2000 to 28 August 2015. The Hurst exponent is used as our efficiency measure which is evaluated by the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). Our findings show strong evidence of long-memory persistence in the markets studied therefore violating the weak-form Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH).
Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 2021
Developing models to analyze time series is a very sophisticated, time-consuming, but interesting... more Developing models to analyze time series is a very sophisticated, time-consuming, but interesting experience for researchers. Commodity price component determination is challenging due to remarkable price volatility, uncertainty, and complexity in the futures market. This study aims to determine the components that drive the market price of commodity futures. This study utilized the decomposition methods, empirical mode decomposition (EMD), and variational mode decomposition (VMD), to analyze three commodity futures prices data: corn from agricultural products, crude oil from energy, and gold from industrial metal. We applied these techniques to decompose the daily data of each commodity price from different periods and frequencies into individual intrinsic mode functions for EMD and modes for VMD. We used the hierarchical clustering method and Euclidean distance approach to classify the IMFs and modes into high-frequency, low-frequency, and trend. Next, applying statistical measure...
Demography and social economy, 2021
Mortality is a critical measure of population’s health and public health systems. Infant mortalit... more Mortality is a critical measure of population’s health and public health systems. Infant mortality, for example, indicates quality of life, accessibility to primary healthcare and the overall health status of a country. Reduction in infant mortality shows improvement in the health status. No credible information about mortality in South Africa because the two previous censuses’ data from Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) were not reliable, this study makes attempt to bridge the gap in the lack of knowledge. Th is study uses South African General Household Survey (SAGHS) data, to fi nd the level and trend of mortality and their implications. Data for the years, 2012, 2013 and 2015, have been used. Demographic and statistical methods, including an evaluation of data quality using UN joint score, and construction of model life tables. The results indicated that the infant mortality rate (IMR) was 43 per 1000 in 2012, 36 per 1000 in 2013 and 21 per 1000 in 2015. Th is study further indi...
Demography and social economy, 2021
Relevance of the research: Th e study of fertility and mortality is of great importance because i... more Relevance of the research: Th e study of fertility and mortality is of great importance because it shows the dynamics of the population and the need for eff ective planning measures required to be put in place to avert catastrophe. It is therefore important for South Africa also to check whether its fertility is heading toward the same trajectory seen in these developed countries. Purpose of the article: This study seeks to determine the level and trend of the fertility in South Africa using four provinces, Mpumalanga, Kwazulu-Natal, North West and Limpopo, for the years 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, as case studies. Th us, the study aims to determine: (a) Whether the fertility rate was changing in the provinces during the years 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. (b) What is the trend? And; (c) Whether the fertility is falling below replacement level or not. Scientifi c novelty of the article: Th e study shows that fertility in South Africa has indeed declined with some provinces having the le...
Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies, Apr 30, 2015
Unemployment is very high in South Africa with the official rate ranging from 26.7% to 35%. The L... more Unemployment is very high in South Africa with the official rate ranging from 26.7% to 35%. The Limpopo province has the highest proportion of rural dwellers in South Africa and possibly higher unemployment rate than the national average. Women's unemployment is a much bigger problem especially when women are the bread winners. Most women singularly look after their children due to polygamy and / or labour migrant system which usually takes the men from home to other parts of the country. This study focuses on factors which militate against women's employment. A 3-stage sample survey was conducted between May 2013 and January 2014 covering all the municipalities in the Sekhukhune district. About 2000 women aged between 20 and 55 years were interviewed. Applying discriminant analysis, this study shows that over 85% of the women in the district are unemployed; and factors like: education, age, family status and marital status affect the employment status of women in Sekhukhune. DA = 0.734educ + 0.654age +0.490familystatus + 0.153marital status If Limpopo wants to reduce unemployment of women and to redress family's crises, this study recommends that efforts be made to "educate" women, i.e. encourage women to complete higher/ tertiary education and also be given special preference/family support in job offers.
Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies, Dec 30, 2015
The paper investigates whether or not parents influence their children's choice for tertiary inst... more The paper investigates whether or not parents influence their children's choice for tertiary institution to attend. Education has increasingly become more important in this present age to the extent that, without higher qualifications, employment and success become very difficult to achieve. Parents are trying to send their children to tertiary institutions so that these children will be employable. But the question is: Do parents choose the tertiary institutions for their children? The paper wants to find out whether or not parents have a say in their children's choice for tertiary institution; and if so, look at factors that could play in the choice. A survey was conducted at the University of Venda from February 2015 to June 2015 and 500 students were conveniently sampled and interviewed. Using some statistical analyses, including Generalized Linear Modelling (GLM), the study concludes that age and the campus environment are the only factors that determine parents' influence on their children's choice for higher education. The study further shows that female students are more influenced by their parents than males in the choice of higher institution.
Childhood mortality is of great interest to social scientists and policy makers concerned about t... more Childhood mortality is of great interest to social scientists and policy makers concerned about the quality of life in less developed countries. Thus, the importance of the study of childhood mortality cannot be exaggerated. The levels of infant and child mortality are the two sensitive and widely used indicators of socio-economic development. The childhood mortality rate is a refined and sensitive index of the total cultural milieu of a community or a country. It reflects among other things, the state of public health and hygiene, the environmental sanitation, cultural mores about feeding and clothing, socio-economic development, and above all, the people’s attitude towards the dignity and value of human life itself. It is the simple statistical index which conveys the idea of whether environmental hazards are controlled effectively or not, in developing countries, especially in Africa. The childhood mortality situation in South Africa has been investigated in this research using S...
Teenage pregnancy is a very big issue globally, but its magnitude in South Africa poses a grave c... more Teenage pregnancy is a very big issue globally, but its magnitude in South Africa poses a grave concern. Alarming figures released by the Gauteng provincial education department indicate that school pregnancies have doubled from 2005 to 2006, despite a decade of spending on sex education and AIDS awareness. The effects of unplanned pregnancy and HIV are a particular concern limiting girls ’ future possibilities. In 2001, the Limpopo province had the highest fertility level in the country with an average of 5 children per woman. But the fertility level in Vhembe which is a district in Limpopo is low at 2.5 children. The study aims to determine the level of teenage fertility in the district and to recommend strategies to curb early pregnancies which turn to destroy the future of many young girls. Using a survey conducted in some municipalities in the district in 2010, this paper reveals that teenage fertility in Vhembe is rather higher. The proportion of teenage births in the district...
Europe PMC (PubMed Central), Oct 25, 2017
Studies on Ethno-Medicine, Dec 1, 2014
There has been a link between nutrition styles and human health and physical features for centuri... more There has been a link between nutrition styles and human health and physical features for centuries. Similarly, there has been a connection between the easiness and difficulty to reach food materials, and shortage and abundance of these material and human behaviors and moral structure. One of the efforts to make a connection between these qualifications comes from Ibn Khaldun. A thinker of Islam, Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the 18 th century, stated that moral characteristics and physical features in the communities which are deprived of food materials are higher than those of the communities having a wealthy living. According to him, overeating leads to the accumulation of harmful wastes in the body and thus to the deterioration of both physical and mental health of human being. Therefore, eating abundant food materials might not result in positive results for man. In the current study, it was investigated how the opportunities of reaching abundant food and types of nutrition affected human health in general and moral structure in Ibn Khaldun.
Journal of Human Ecology, 2015
The paper examined the effectiveness of public extension support for dryland smallholder grain pr... more The paper examined the effectiveness of public extension support for dryland smallholder grain producers. Both probability and non-probability sampling procedures were used to select districts, Local Agricultural Offices and farmers from 20 villages of Limpopo province, South Africa in January 2014. Data was collected from field-level extension agents and farmers using semi-structured questionnaires. Descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to analyze the data. Results show that most agents promoted conservation agriculture as a climate variability coping strategy. Furthermore, public extension support made a difference in farmers' yield over nonextension recipients' yields, though small. Forty percent of maize producers who received extension support bought extra maize meal for home consumption indicating maize yields from farmers' own production was insufficient to ensure household food security. Findings also suggest non-farming sources contributed more to respondents' household income than farming. Extension support, therefore, needs improvement to effectively support farmers' production in light of climate variability.
Journal of Human Ecology, 2015
Scarcity of food scientists in developing countries is a global and emerging critical problem req... more Scarcity of food scientists in developing countries is a global and emerging critical problem requiring efforts to address global food security. The perception and awareness of Food Science and Technology (FST) amongst the majority of high school learners (HSL) in Limpopo province was low at about 25 percent. The present study covered 1,539 high schools in all the five districts of Limpopo. A structured questionnaire was used to capture information from the HSL. The results show that there are significant differences in the awareness and knowledge of FST among the districts. Awareness in Sekhukhune district is 46 percent, while that in the other districts ranges from 18 percent to 25 percent. If developing continents, like Africa, are to overcome food insecurity, deliberate efforts need to be made to ascertain that FST, as a discipline, receives the proper image and boost in enrolment.
Journal of African Business, Jan 31, 2021
ABSTRACT The need for exchange markets coordination in Africa is rooted in the quest of most econ... more ABSTRACT The need for exchange markets coordination in Africa is rooted in the quest of most economic blocs to form a monetary union characterized by a single currency and has therefore attracted the attention of researchers. The intrinsic complexity of the exchange rate market hinders researchers from producing consistently good results. The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is a data-driven signal analysis method for nonlinear and nonstationary data. Empirical mode decomposition method can be used to divide nonlinear signal sequences into a group of well-behaved intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residue, so that we can compare the similarities. In this paper, EMD and ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), a modified version of EMD, are applied to the exchange rate market of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Through analyzing the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) of EMD and EEMD, we find the EEMD method to perform better on the orthogonality of IMFs than EMD. We propose a new way of analyzing short and long-run comovement through the analysis of the characteristics of IMFs and residue. The analysis of the IMFs and residue obtained from EEMD showed that exchange rate markets in SADC are driven by economic fundamentals and 12 out of 15 countries examined showed some level of similarity in the long-term trend. Our findings have implications for the direction of future SADC monetary union.
Journal of Economics and Finance, 2021
We used the detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA) method based on ensemble empirical mode d... more We used the detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA) method based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) to study the dynamic interdependence structure of daily domestic currency to US dollar exchange rates of 15 Southern African Development Community (SADC) exchange rate markets. We first decompose all series into intrinsic mode functions using EEMD and reconstruct the series into three frequency modes: high-, medium- and low frequency, and residue. The DCCA method was used to analyze the cross-correlation between the various frequencies, residues and original series. These were meant to address the nonlinearity and nonstationarity in observed exchange rate data. Finally, we formed a correlation network from the cross-correlation coefficients in all cases which revealed rich than would have been obtained from the original series. We observed similarities between the nature of cross-correlation between high-frequency series mimic the original series and the significant cross-correlation among the long-term trend of most SADC countries exchange rate markets. The innovation of this paper is to combine EEMD with DCCA to study the multifrequency cross-correlations of exchange rate markets, which can provide policymakers a deeper understanding of the dynamics of exchange rate markets toward the formation of currency unions.
South African Statistical Journal, 2021
We present the results of a simulation study performed to compare the accuracy of a lassotype pen... more We present the results of a simulation study performed to compare the accuracy of a lassotype penalization method and gradient boosting in estimating the baseline hazard function and covariate parameters in discrete survival models. The mean square error results reveal that the lasso-type algorithm performs better in recovering the baseline hazard and covariate parameters. In particular, gradient boosting underestimates the sizes of the parameters and also has a high false positive rate. Similar results are obtained in an application to real-life data.
IEEE Access, 2022
Price instability is a paramount concern since commodity prices are associated with the livelihoo... more Price instability is a paramount concern since commodity prices are associated with the livelihood and the economy of a nation as a whole; any extraordinary price fluctuation in the futures market shows that forecasts in commodities is an essential venture. The difficulties in predicting commodity prices are due to the unpredictability of the world's financial issues, fiscal dispensation, the speculative market's exacerbation, and several other elements. This study aims to model and forecast the market price of commodity futures. We applied decomposition techniques, empirical mode decomposition (EMD), and variational mode decomposition (VMD) to three commodities: corn, crude oil, and gold over the commodity spot market prices. We used the Granger causality test to establish mutual relationships amongst the three commodity futures prices. Three commodity price data with different periods were decomposed into several intrinsic modes. Using three forecasting performance evaluation criteria, statistical measures such as mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean percentage error (MAPE) to compare the capabilities of the suggested models. We also introduced Diebold Mariano (DM) test in selecting the optimal models for each commodity, since MAE, RMSE and MAPE have some shortcomings. We found that the combined models outperformed the individual back propagation neural network (BPNN) and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models in forecasting corn and crude oil futures prices series, while BPNN emerged as the optimal model for predicting gold futures prices series. Variational mode decomposition emerged as the ideal data pre-treatment method and contributed to enhancing the predicting ability of the BPNN and the ARIMA models. The empirical results showed that models combined with decomposition methods predict commodity futures prices accurately and can easily capture the volatility in commodity futures prices. INDEX TERMS Back propagation neural network, commodity price, empirical mode decomposition, forecasting, Granger causality test, variational mode decomposition. NOMENCLATURE ADMM Alternate direction method of multipliers MI Machine intelligence ARMA Autoregressive moving average BPNN Back-propagation neural network COMEX Commodity Exchange Inc EEMD Ensemble empirical mode decomposition EMD Empirical mode decomposition The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Amin Zehtabian .
The paper investigates the stationarity of eight indices on eight African stock markets. We revie... more The paper investigates the stationarity of eight indices on eight African stock markets. We review the extant literature on the stationarity of African stock markets and build on the works of Zhang et al. (2012) and Smith and Dyakova (2014). We use the non-linear ADF unit root test and the modified Wald type test under an ESTAR framework in our study. Our results show that both non-linear unit root tests fail to reject the null of unit root in all the markets but for Botswana. We infer from our results that the stock markets in Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia are non-stationary and hence weak-form efficient. Our work goes to agree with Choi and Moh (2007) who believe that, the presence of non-linear pattern in a data has no effect on the performance of a unit root test if the non-linear process is far from a unit root process.
Emerging stock markets are said to become efficient with time. This study seeks to investigate th... more Emerging stock markets are said to become efficient with time. This study seeks to investigate this assertion by analyzing long-memory persistence in 8 African stock markets covering the period from 28 August 2000 to 28 August 2015. The Hurst exponent is used as our efficiency measure which is evaluated by the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). Our findings show strong evidence of long-memory persistence in the markets studied therefore violating the weak-form Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH).
Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 2021
Developing models to analyze time series is a very sophisticated, time-consuming, but interesting... more Developing models to analyze time series is a very sophisticated, time-consuming, but interesting experience for researchers. Commodity price component determination is challenging due to remarkable price volatility, uncertainty, and complexity in the futures market. This study aims to determine the components that drive the market price of commodity futures. This study utilized the decomposition methods, empirical mode decomposition (EMD), and variational mode decomposition (VMD), to analyze three commodity futures prices data: corn from agricultural products, crude oil from energy, and gold from industrial metal. We applied these techniques to decompose the daily data of each commodity price from different periods and frequencies into individual intrinsic mode functions for EMD and modes for VMD. We used the hierarchical clustering method and Euclidean distance approach to classify the IMFs and modes into high-frequency, low-frequency, and trend. Next, applying statistical measure...
Demography and social economy, 2021
Mortality is a critical measure of population’s health and public health systems. Infant mortalit... more Mortality is a critical measure of population’s health and public health systems. Infant mortality, for example, indicates quality of life, accessibility to primary healthcare and the overall health status of a country. Reduction in infant mortality shows improvement in the health status. No credible information about mortality in South Africa because the two previous censuses’ data from Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) were not reliable, this study makes attempt to bridge the gap in the lack of knowledge. Th is study uses South African General Household Survey (SAGHS) data, to fi nd the level and trend of mortality and their implications. Data for the years, 2012, 2013 and 2015, have been used. Demographic and statistical methods, including an evaluation of data quality using UN joint score, and construction of model life tables. The results indicated that the infant mortality rate (IMR) was 43 per 1000 in 2012, 36 per 1000 in 2013 and 21 per 1000 in 2015. Th is study further indi...
Demography and social economy, 2021
Relevance of the research: Th e study of fertility and mortality is of great importance because i... more Relevance of the research: Th e study of fertility and mortality is of great importance because it shows the dynamics of the population and the need for eff ective planning measures required to be put in place to avert catastrophe. It is therefore important for South Africa also to check whether its fertility is heading toward the same trajectory seen in these developed countries. Purpose of the article: This study seeks to determine the level and trend of the fertility in South Africa using four provinces, Mpumalanga, Kwazulu-Natal, North West and Limpopo, for the years 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, as case studies. Th us, the study aims to determine: (a) Whether the fertility rate was changing in the provinces during the years 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. (b) What is the trend? And; (c) Whether the fertility is falling below replacement level or not. Scientifi c novelty of the article: Th e study shows that fertility in South Africa has indeed declined with some provinces having the le...
Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies, Apr 30, 2015
Unemployment is very high in South Africa with the official rate ranging from 26.7% to 35%. The L... more Unemployment is very high in South Africa with the official rate ranging from 26.7% to 35%. The Limpopo province has the highest proportion of rural dwellers in South Africa and possibly higher unemployment rate than the national average. Women's unemployment is a much bigger problem especially when women are the bread winners. Most women singularly look after their children due to polygamy and / or labour migrant system which usually takes the men from home to other parts of the country. This study focuses on factors which militate against women's employment. A 3-stage sample survey was conducted between May 2013 and January 2014 covering all the municipalities in the Sekhukhune district. About 2000 women aged between 20 and 55 years were interviewed. Applying discriminant analysis, this study shows that over 85% of the women in the district are unemployed; and factors like: education, age, family status and marital status affect the employment status of women in Sekhukhune. DA = 0.734educ + 0.654age +0.490familystatus + 0.153marital status If Limpopo wants to reduce unemployment of women and to redress family's crises, this study recommends that efforts be made to "educate" women, i.e. encourage women to complete higher/ tertiary education and also be given special preference/family support in job offers.
Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies, Dec 30, 2015
The paper investigates whether or not parents influence their children's choice for tertiary inst... more The paper investigates whether or not parents influence their children's choice for tertiary institution to attend. Education has increasingly become more important in this present age to the extent that, without higher qualifications, employment and success become very difficult to achieve. Parents are trying to send their children to tertiary institutions so that these children will be employable. But the question is: Do parents choose the tertiary institutions for their children? The paper wants to find out whether or not parents have a say in their children's choice for tertiary institution; and if so, look at factors that could play in the choice. A survey was conducted at the University of Venda from February 2015 to June 2015 and 500 students were conveniently sampled and interviewed. Using some statistical analyses, including Generalized Linear Modelling (GLM), the study concludes that age and the campus environment are the only factors that determine parents' influence on their children's choice for higher education. The study further shows that female students are more influenced by their parents than males in the choice of higher institution.
Childhood mortality is of great interest to social scientists and policy makers concerned about t... more Childhood mortality is of great interest to social scientists and policy makers concerned about the quality of life in less developed countries. Thus, the importance of the study of childhood mortality cannot be exaggerated. The levels of infant and child mortality are the two sensitive and widely used indicators of socio-economic development. The childhood mortality rate is a refined and sensitive index of the total cultural milieu of a community or a country. It reflects among other things, the state of public health and hygiene, the environmental sanitation, cultural mores about feeding and clothing, socio-economic development, and above all, the people’s attitude towards the dignity and value of human life itself. It is the simple statistical index which conveys the idea of whether environmental hazards are controlled effectively or not, in developing countries, especially in Africa. The childhood mortality situation in South Africa has been investigated in this research using S...
Teenage pregnancy is a very big issue globally, but its magnitude in South Africa poses a grave c... more Teenage pregnancy is a very big issue globally, but its magnitude in South Africa poses a grave concern. Alarming figures released by the Gauteng provincial education department indicate that school pregnancies have doubled from 2005 to 2006, despite a decade of spending on sex education and AIDS awareness. The effects of unplanned pregnancy and HIV are a particular concern limiting girls ’ future possibilities. In 2001, the Limpopo province had the highest fertility level in the country with an average of 5 children per woman. But the fertility level in Vhembe which is a district in Limpopo is low at 2.5 children. The study aims to determine the level of teenage fertility in the district and to recommend strategies to curb early pregnancies which turn to destroy the future of many young girls. Using a survey conducted in some municipalities in the district in 2010, this paper reveals that teenage fertility in Vhembe is rather higher. The proportion of teenage births in the district...