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To explore the politics of gender, health, medicine, and citizenship in high-income countries, medical sociologists have focused primarily on the practice of legal abortion. In middle- and low-income countries with restrictive abortion laws, however, medical sociologists must examine what happens when women have already experienced spontaneous or induced abortion. Post-abortion care (PAC), a global reproductive health intervention that treats complications of abortion and has been implemented in nearly 50 countries worldwide, offers important theoretical insights into transnational politics of abortion and reproduction in countries with restrictive abortion laws. In this chapter, I draw on my ethnography of Senegal’s PAC program to examine the professional, clinical, and technological politics and practices of obstetric care for abortions that have already occurred. I use the sociological concepts of professional boundary work and boundary objects to demonstrate how Senegalese health professionals have established the political and clinical legitimacy of PAC. I demonstrate the professional precariousness of practicing PAC for physicians, midwives, and nurses. I show how the dual capacity of PAC technologies to terminate pregnancy and treat abortion complications has limited their circulation within the health system, thereby reducing quality of care. Given the contradictory and complex global landscape of twenty-first-century abortion governance, in which pharmaceutical forms of abortion such as Misoprostol are increasingly available in developing countries, and as abortion restrictions are increasingly enforced across the developed world, PAC offers important theoretical opportunities to advance medical sociology research on abortion politics and practices in the global North and South.

The Millennium Development Coals (MDGs) are a potentially powerful tool for economic development. There is the growing awareness about the economic importance of tourism in Nigeria. Though the industry is fraught with certain challenges, which are seemingly insurmountable, it has a crucial role to play in helping Nigeria to achieve the 2015 anti‐poverty MDGs. This paper discusses some of the potential benefits of the tourism industry in Nigeria as well as an overview of the industry. Furthermore, it states the MDGs and its limitations. Furthermore it will discuss some of the problems that could impede the growth of the tourism sector. As Nigeria is becoming keenly aware of the substantial development potentials of tourism, this paper presents some recommendations to be considered in order to reap these potentials and facilitate the process of achieving the MDGs.

Researchers have long been interested in testing the validity of Okun’s law due to its macroeconomic policy implications. However, most of the studies have focused on testing the law using aggregate data on unemployment and output. In recent times, attention has been shifted to testing the law at the sectoral level. In light of this, the purpose of this study is to examine the response of unemployment to sectoral outputs in Nigeria using the data that covers a period from 1981-2020.

To test the validity of Okun’s law at the sectoral level, both difference and gap methods of specifying Okun’s law are used. Furthermore, the author also uses a series of estimation methods, which include ordinary least squares (OLS), dynamic OLS (DOLS), fully modified OLS (FMOLS) and canonical cointegration regression (CCR).

The results, based on the difference model, are mixed irrespective of estimation and data filter methods. For the gap model, Okun’s law holds for all sectors irrespective of estimation techniques (especially DOLS, FMOLS and CCR) when the Hodrick–Prescott filter method is used to filter data. However, the author discovers that the coefficients of Okun’s law vary across the sectors as the response of unemployment to services sector output is greater than the rest of the sectors. When the Hamilton filter method is used to filter data, the results appear to be mixed across the sectors. The results are almost ditto when all the sectoral variables are put in one model.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the validity of sectoral Okun’s law in Nigeria, the leading economy in Africa.

Samples of dry‐roasted groundnuts purchased from street hawkers, markets and retail shops in southwestern Nigeria were analysed for moisture content, fungal populations and aflatoxin contamination. The moisture content varied from 2.1 to 3.6 per cent, while the mould counts using the dilution plating method ranged from 2.9 × 10² to 6.3 × 10² colony‐forming units per gram in samples. Aflatoxin B₁ was found in 64.2 per cent of samples with a mean of 25.5 ppb. Aflatoxins B_2, G₁ and G₂ were detected in 26.4, 11.3 and 2.8 per cent of the samples with mean levels of 10.7, 7.2 and 8 ppb respectively in contaminated samples. It is concluded that the regular consumption of DRG by Nigerians might present potential health hazards.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of consumers preferences on textile materials and the impact of consumer preference on performance of textile industry. This is because as consumers have access to a variety of textile products, they strongly developed and shifted preference to foreign sources, which could lead to the eventual demise of many of the textile factories.

The logit model is adopted to describe the behaviour of consumers when faced with a variety of mutually exclusive choices. The model also describes the consumers’ choice of differentiated goods with common consumption objectives but with different characteristics.

Findings revealed that consumers in Nigeria prefer foreign textile to locally made textile. In addition, differences in quality and availability are factors that drive consumer’s preference towards foreign textile. Also, the inefficient performance of the Nigerian textile industry is influenced by limited demand from the domestic market, poor infrastructure and smuggling. Hence, there is a need for innovative entrepreneurship, concentration on quality improvement and alleviating supply constraints.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examines consumer preferences in the Nigerian textile industry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role colonial ties play in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) to Ghana, several years after the official end of colonisation in the African continent. Colonisation left behind legacies of institutional framework, social ties and remnants of companies of colonial masters, which could potentially offer contemporary businesses from home countries the benefits of country of origin agglomeration.

This paper uses sequential explanatory mixed research design through 101 questionnaires and 8 interviews from the UK companies with FDI in Ghana. This approached enabled the initial quantitative results to be explored further through the qualitative data.

Colonial ties have limited influence on contemporary flow of FDI to Ghana, in spite of the institutional legacies between former colonisers and colonies. Majority of UK companies are influenced by agglomeration opportunities in general rather than country of origin agglomeration. However, country of origin agglomeration remains important to over a third of the companies surveyed.

The sample was taken from the non-extractive industry in Ghana, and caution must be applied in generalising the findings. However, some universal issues concerning agglomeration and institutions are discussed.

Although there has been some research on colonial history and its impact on FDI in Africa, existing knowledge on bilateral relations is rather limited. Unlike previous studies, this research provides depth by examining colonial influence on FDI between two countries, using two key concepts: country of origin agglomeration and institutions. It provides UK companies with contemporary views to consider when exploring FDI opportunities in Ghana, particularly in relation to the effects of the colonial history. It also provides investment promotion agencies with empirical results on the importance of various forms of agglomeration and institutions for FDI attraction.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate Nigeria's audiovisual services import demand using foreign football transmitted through digital satellite television (DSTV) as a case study. The major focus is on whether such imports effectively replace local recreation in watching domestic football.

The authors examined descriptive statistics. The methodology employed is a combination of descriptive analysis and cross‐sectional regression.

The paper's analytical framework establishes a link between the conventional import demand and demand for football functions, while the estimated empirical counterpart found that the demand for foreign football via cross‐border satellite transmission is a statistically significant function of taste for foreign football, quality, and entertainment. While descriptive statistics indicate respondents’ preference for foreign football, the test of significance rejected the hypothesis that the demand for foreign football broadcast service imports has replaced demand for domestic football as an entertaining sport. In addition, the demand for foreign football broadcast is fairly inelastic, as a greater percentage of the respondents will watch foreign football even if the cost of subscription or cost of paying per view in the viewing centers increase.

The paper describes the first of this type of research to be conducted in Nigeria.

Given the inconclusive evidence in the literature on the impact of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows, as well as dearth of literature on this subject matter as regards West Africa and the European Union (EU), the purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which BITs and preferential trade and investment agreements (PTIAs) triggered foreign investment flows particularly between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries and the EU.

Trend analysis was used to trace the link between FDI and BITs, while panel regression models were used to investigate the impact of BITs on FDI during 1980‐2010.

Econometric results indicate that, as in most previous studies, BITs have strong positive impact on FDI in West Africa, with this impact significant at a higher level (1 per cent) for FDI flow than stock (5 per cent). The impact of BITs on FDI is significant even with the state of internal factors (such as capital account liberalisation, trade openness, high inflation rate and poor governance) in West African countries. The findings suggest that in the absence of BITs, West African countries would have suffered adversely from poor FDI inflows given their poor macroeconomic stability and governance. On the contrary, the PTIAs did not have significant impact on both FDI flows and stock. The results also show that FDI inflow to West Africa is both market and resources seeking.

Sensitivity analysis may not have been sufficient. For instance, not tested was the impact of the signalling effect of BIT, as well as other vertical FDI such as those from the USA.

The implication of the findings is that West Africa countries need to design policies and programmes that will enable them to maximise the technological spill‐over from FDI in order not to be perpetual suppliers of primary products and purchasers of manufactured goods. Further, they have to maintain macroeconomic stability and good governance. They need to understand the type of provisions in the BITs that constituent states signed and compare with the provisions of the PTIAs, with a view to discerning what is responsible for the superior response of FDI to BITs.

Given the absence of literature on the impact of BITs on FDI flows between West Africa and EU, it becomes imperative to investigate this issue with a view to motivating the investment component of the EPA, as investment is one of the Singapore issues that were removed from WTO's Doha Round.