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The study aims to assess the effect of English and French language literacy on the welfare of Ghanaian women in trade. Also, this study analyses the geographical variations of such effects from rural to urban areas.

Using the latest living standards survey data, the standard two-stage least squares instrumental variable approach was used to estimate the causal effects.

The results show that Ghanaian women in trade who are both English and French literate or only English literate are able to improve their welfare significantly relative to their fellows who are illiterate in both English and French or only English, whilst those who are solely French literate do not experience any significant improvement in welfare from trade compared with their counterparts. From the heterogeneous analysis, the findings indicate that the effect is significantly concentrated amongst rural traders but insignificant amongst urban traders.

The findings of this study inform government and policymakers to consider the effectiveness of the free senior high school (SHS) education policy in improving English and French language literacy and the welfare of women in Ghana. It also informs educational institutions on the importance of adult education in English and French, especially amongst women.

The study quantitatively estimates the effect of English and French language literacy on the welfare of Ghanaian women in trade by employing an instrumental variable approach to assess the causal effect. Uniquely, the study finds that language literacy is a significant tool in improving the welfare of rural women engaged in trade in Ghana.

What people understand by climate change can differ depending on whether and how the change affects their livelihoods. It is largely documented that farmers who depend on rainfall to cultivate crops understand climate change as a change in climatic elements, especially rainfall which negatively affects crop production. However, studies on how people whose livelihoods do not directly depend on climate change understand it, whether and how the changes affect their livelihoods and whether and how they are coping to the change are limited in the literature. This paper aims to therefore determine perspective of traders of climate change and how they cope.

The data collection took place in Accra, which is the capital city of Ghana. Thousand traders who sold unprocessed and processed food as well as manufactured goods took part in the study. Questionnaires which were largely open-ended were administered. SPSS version 16 was used to analyse the data. In addition, some of the interview responses were included verbatim to support study participants view on some issues.

The majority of the respondents engaged in trading of manufactured goods. The respondents understood climate change as prolonged dry season and changes in rainfall pattern. About 97 per cent of the respondents said climate change had negatively impacted their trading activities, and almost all respondents (91 per cent) who were affected by climate change livelihoods were also affected such that they were unable to meet their basic needs. About 23 per cent have adopted coping strategies by depending on friends, relatives and engaging in menial jobs, and 63 per cent adopted no coping strategy.

It seems that rural farmers may have more options than urban traders during climate change. This can mean that research and policy efforts towards adaption to climate change should not focus only on farmers but traders as well.

This study aims to examine the experiences and lessons from formalisation initiatives in four sub-Saharan African countries. Drawing upon the three main theories that explain the existence of business informality – the exclusion model, rational exit model and dual economy model – the study offers an alternative path to business formalisation.

The researchers adopted a descriptive-qualitative method, and through the triangulation of data, identified emerging themes and patterns.

The findings suggest that the informal sector has a small layer that responds to the simplification of regulations and a larger one that requires a different formalisation framework. This shift in paradigm, indirect or group formalisation, where business associations facilitate traceability (registration), self-regulation, access to resources and services for members was observed in all four of the economies studied: Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda and Tanzania.

As with every qualitative study, subjectivity and interpretation inevitably affect the replicability and generalisability of the findings. However, the rich meanings emerging from the qualitative analysis of the text are critically insightful.

Developing countries should explore indirect formalisation. Provision of workspace and construction of business premises for informal operators should be given high priority. The model for building structures for micro enterprises should change in favour of ownership by the operators through their own associations or other private sector investors.

A pioneering study on cross-country analysis based on sub-Saharan African nations to unearth a new paradigm, a shift towards indirect or group formalisation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of mobile phones on the micro‐trading activities of traders in Ghana. The study aims to develop a conceptual model analyzing the impact of mobile phones on pre‐trade, during‐trade and post‐trade activities.

A mixed methods approach consisting of a descriptive survey of 136 traders and a case study of two traders was adopted.

The findings suggest that traders primarily use mobile phones to monitor goods and pricing strategies, scheduling deliveries, and addressing inquiries and complaints in during‐trade activities. Traders, including those with no formal education, also use mobile phones as calculators in post‐trade activities. This innovative use of mobile phones is a function of their pre‐knowledge which may have been developed through formal education and/or social networks. Improving information management through mobile phones directly or indirectly contributes to the economic empowerment of the trader.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework that extends the transaction cost theory to consider transaction benefits and effects in micro‐trading. The study develops four propositions which can guide future research.

The study provides practitioners with a “theoretically‐inspired” framework which goes beyond examining design and adoption to identify needs and assess impact in mobiles for development initiatives.

The conceptual framework extends the work on transaction cost theory in information systems and may inform future research in mobile phones and micro‐trading activities.

The paper aims to examine agrochemical traders’ tax morale in three Ghanaian regions.

Primary data were collected from 92 respondents using structured questionnaires. A multistage sampling technique was employed and used in selecting respondents.. Descriptive statistics, factor analysis and quantile regression analysis were used to analyse data obtained via the questionnaires.

The study found tax reporting knowledge, tax calculating knowledge and tax payment knowledge to be the keen factors influencing agrochemical traders’ tax knowledge. It was also revealed that age, religion and marriage positively influence the tax morale of traders. Inversely, gender, high level of education and monthly sales were found to affect tax morale negatively. Moreover, trust (respect, trustworthiness and expertise knowledge) negatively influenced tax morale. Authorities’ tax knowledge and power (sanction and lockdown) were revealed to impact tax morale positively. However, tax morale decreases amongst agrochemical traders with higher tax morale when sanction increases.

Unlike previous studies which focussed on tax morale amongst individuals and firms outside the agribusiness sector, this study examined the tax morale within the informal agrochemical trading sector, which has recently attracted colossal patronage due to the high usage of agrochemicals amongst farmers in Africa and Ghana. This study also assumed tax morale to be at different levels; hence the factors that affect the morale at different levels differ. Therefore, the study examined the factors influencing tax morale amongst agrochemical traders by segregating tax morale into quartiles. Relating to theory, the economic deterrence theory was used to ground the study, which is not usually used in most tax morale studies.

This chapter focuses on a pathway for the creation of a just and equitable food system in South Africa that contributes to achieving the right to food and livelihoods for all. It is based on years of ongoing research on food systems in South Africa and Tanzania as well as a current research project on the impact of COVID-19 regulations on food systems in South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania. The chapter starts with looking at the challenges of the food system in South Africa, the problematic approaches to addressing these challenges and how the situation has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. Then it explores a different way of looking at and transforming the food system that moves away from the focus on corporate driven solutions and applies a different lens to analysing who the stakeholders are. The argument is for the advancement of economic actors identified by where they sit on the intersecting continuums from more marketised to more socially embedded, from more elite to the subaltern, and from larger to smaller scale. This lens makes it clear which type of enterprises and economic actors need to be supported and the alliances that need to be built to create a pathway to a better food future in the urbanising South African society and perhaps elsewhere as well.

This paper examined tax compliance and its impact on agrochemical traders in Ghana.

Based on the registered agrochemical lists obtained from the Plant Protection and Regulatory Service Department, 92 agrochemical traders were sampled for data collection. Probit regression was used to estimate determinants of tax compliance, whereas the Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment Model was employed to evaluate the impact of tax compliance on business performance.

The results revealed that age and gender relate positively to enforced tax compliance, while education positively impacts voluntary tax compliance. Nonetheless, tax rate, trust and monthly sales positively affect voluntary tax compliance but negatively impact enforced tax compliance. Inversely, while authorities’ power negatively impacted voluntary compliance, it positively influenced enforced tax compliance confirming the Slippery Slope Framework.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this paper is the first to investigate tax compliance determinants and impact among agrochemical traders, despite the tremendous growth of the agrochemical sub-sector in Africa and Ghana. Therefore, this study makes a modest contribution to empirical studies that validate the Slippery Slope Framework in promoting tax compliance in the agricultural and agribusiness sectors of a developing country. Similarly, it also unearths the impact of tax compliance on agribusiness growth which has yet to be highlighted in the extant literature.

This study aims to investigate the health-care-seeking behaviour and practices of West African migrants who reside and operate in Wa, Ghana, as itinerant retailers.

The study was cross-sectional and used the quantitative research approach. The analysis was done on a target population comprising 122 itinerant immigrant retail traders in Wa, Ghana. Fisher’s exact test and logistic regression were used to analyse the data.

Malaria was the commonest disease among them. Five in ten of the migrants preferred to report malaria episodes to a private health facility than to a government facility. Significant associations were identified between four dimensions (health facility, self-medication, home remedy and consult others) of health-seeking behaviour, and some background characteristics. The main reason why migrants prefer government health facilities was because of their better health personnel. They self-medicated because of easy accessibility of over-the-counter medicine shops. Also, when ill, the migrants usually consulted family members who would be in a position to take them home when their ailment worsens.

Snowball sampling was used to select the respondents which could potentially lead to a sample that is not fully representative of the population in general.

Studies concerning migration and health in Ghana have been focused on internal migrants. Yet, minority immigrant traders equally encounter adverse health conditions but limited studies have been conducted to espouse their health-seeking behaviour. This study imperatively contributes to the subject matter that has limited literature in the country.

Microenterprises in emerging economies are known to operate in turbulent and resource-scarce environments. We test our hypothesis that a more comprehensive “Integrated Capital-Based Model” (ICBM) is needed when explaining the performance of microenterprises in such an environment. The model combines traditionally researched financial, human and social capital with more recently emphasized psychological and cognitive capital, providing greater explanatory power than models using only the traditional types of capital.

We use a pooled linear regression to analyze an existing survey of more than 900 independent business owners who were interviewed seven times between 2008 and 2012 in the Accra and Tema marketplaces in Ghana. We measure the performance of microenterprises using three dependent variables (revenue, profits, and productivity). We contrast the explanatory power of ICBM models against the more traditional models.

The ICBM has significantly higher levels of explanatory power over the traditional models in examining the performance of these microenterprises. These results highlight the importance of psychological and cognitive capital in emerging economies.

We advocate for a more comprehensive view of capital as shown in our ICBM. However, the data were gathered only in an urban setting, which limits the generalizability to rural parts of emerging economies.

These findings suggest the utility of government and appropriate agencies finding ways to enhance the level of psychological and cognitive capital of microenterprise owners.

This paper's originality stems from hypothesizing and empirically confirming the higher predictive efficacy of ICBM against more traditionally researched capital sources.