Resource‐led Development: An Illustrative Example from Nigeria

Abstract: Several strategies are open to an economy in its attempt to attain sustainable economic development, depending on its historical background and resource endowment. One such strategy is the resource‐led strategy. Nigeria is very rich in crude oil and has reaped billions of petrodollars. However, the country faces the problem of successfully translating this huge oil wealth into sustainable development. This paper employs the vector error correction technique in examining the long‐run impact of the huge oil wealth accruing to Nigeria on its economic development. Basic indicators such as growth, private consumption, infrastructure (electricity), agriculture and manufacturing output growth rates are examined. The empirical results suggest a significant positive long‐run impact of per capita oil revenue on per capita household consumption and electricity generation while a negative relationship is established for GDP, agriculture and manufacturing. Even for those with a negative relationship at current period, there exist positive relationships at subsequent lags. Thus, oil revenue, if properly managed and invested, could be effectively used to induce oil‐led development for Nigeria provided that the initial inhibitions of corruption, lack of transparency, accountability and fairness in its use and distribution are removed.     

Farmers' Variety Attribute Preferences: Implications for Breeding Priority Setting and Agricultural Extension Policy in Ethiopia*

Abstract: Technological progress in Ethiopian agriculture is the slowest by any standard, with rather very poor capacity to address the nation's problems of low agricultural productivity, poverty, and resource degradation. This paper argues and attributes the low level of technology adoption and impact to the discrepancy between the farmers' needs and the attributes of technologies generated. The empirical evidences have been generated based on the analyses of coffee farmers' variety attribute preferences, taking coffee seedlings as production technologies. Attribute preferences of smallholder farmers are governed by their contextual household characteristics, institutional, and socioeconomic factors. According to the results, risk vulnerable farmers prefer seeds adaptable to their local conditions and varieties with stable yield attribute. On the contrary, farmers in more accessible areas and/or those who are less concerned in securing subsistence income levels opt for income maximizing attributes, namely, yield and marketability. The study results have also shown the mechanisms of how farmers' attribute preferences change with development‐oriented interventions. The paper demonstrates why and how policy‐makers should formulate context specific technology development and agricultural extension strategies.     

Technology-related factors as determinants of export potential of Nigerian manufacturing firms

A critical input that enables capacity for export is investment in technology at the firm-level. Using a survey data, this study investigates technology investments by firms in Southwest Nigeria and how technology investment related factors affect the export potential of firms. Results demonstrate that investments in technology are dominated by imported technologies, investments in ICTs are becoming widespread, and technology investments are not directly targeted at improving the export potential of firms. The results also showed that firm size has a strong positive relationship with export potential, and it is the most important factor that affects the export potential of firms. The coefficient of firm size is the only parameter estimate that is consistently statistically significant at 1% level for all four export models estimated. Other technology investment related factors that impact positively on export potential include skills intensity, investment in skills upgrading, and investment in quality management.     

Uses of Redundancy in Print Advertisements in Nigeria

The creative repetition of the most important aspects of communications, or redundancy, is a strategy employed in the field of advertising to ensure that messages are understood and acted upon by the audience or prospects. The article shows the influence of redundancy on consumer learning. Six brand advertisements were purposively selected and analyzed for content to demonstrate the occurrence, uses, and limitations of creative repetition of messages in advertising, along with appropriate recommendations.     

The dis-incentive effects of food aid and agricultural policies on local land allocation in developing countries: The case of Malawi

Food aid and other agricultural policies can create incentives/disincentives in local agricultural production. This paper provides empirical evidence on the disincentive effects of both food aid and some agricultural policies in Malawi. In contrast to previous studies, this paper analyses the impact of food aid on the proportion of land allocated to cereal crops and the interplay of both food aid and other agricultural policies in creating disincentive effects. Data were analysed using the logit transformation regression. It was found that, in addition to the disincentive effects of food aid, agricultural policies including price controls and sustained reliance on imported cereals were also undermining incentives to sustain local agricultural production. Therefore, both food aid and agricultural price policies need to be aligned to farmers' incentives to optimcally allocate land to food production.     

The Reliability of Reported Profits and Asset Values, 1890–1914: Case Studies from the British Coal Industry

Considering the vital importance of coal to the British economy before 1914, it is clear that accounting practices in the coal industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have received too little attention. There is a particular need for studies comparable to the work on railways and iron and steel which has examined conventions for accounting for capital expenditure. Such conventions create serious difficulties in the interpretation of reported profits and asset values for historians of any industry and may also have misled contemporaries. Evidence for the coal industry which has been examined up till now has indicated that standard practice comprised a modified form of the replacement accounting used by railway companies. This paper examines the extent to which this supposition is justified. It concentrates on the accounting policies of five important colliery companies and on the effects of these policies on profits and the book values of fixed assets. Two principal conclusions have emerged. The first is that, although replacement accounting was certainly widespread, accounting policies were more complex and more diverse than has hitherto been suggested. The second is that it is frequently impossible for the historian to determine whether balance sheet values are indicative of capital employed. Both profits and asset values were in most cases highly unreliable.