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This paper examines the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 and the policy response in African countries.

This study uses discourse analysis to analyse the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 in Africa.

The findings reveal that African countries have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, and the effect was more severe for African regions compared to other regions. The rising pandemic affected social interaction and economic activities through the imposed social distancing policies that have different levels of strictness in several African countries

The implication of the findings is that social policies can affect the social and economic well-being of citizens. Secondly, the coronavirus outbreak has revealed how a biological crisis can be transformed to a sociological subject. The most important sociological consequence of the coronavirus outbreak for African citizens is the creation of social anxiety among families and households in the region. The outbreak has also shown how vulnerable African societies are in facing health hazards. Policymakers should enforce social policies that unite communities in bad times, to reduce social anxiety.

This is the first paper that explore the socio-economic impact of coronavirus and the policy response in African countries.

Purpose – Drawing on a survey of over 1,000 Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals and over a dozen interviews, this chapter explores the student loan crisis from an LIS perspective and offers practical solutions for the field to decrease debt from LIS graduate programs, which has ballooned in recent years.

Design/Methodology/Approach – In April 2016, I sent a survey via email to approximately 10 library-affiliated listservs ranging from Code4Lib to the UMD iSchool discussion list. While I attempted to keep the reach small and controlled to only library-affiliated listservs, the survey link quickly spread to Twitter and other social media. The survey attracted 1,630 qualified responses and ran for two weeks in total. Using skip logic, all potential respondents who did not attend a library school (26 in total) were automatically disqualified. Email addresses were provided by 497 participants for interview post-survey. I received 215 partial responses. In September 2016, I conducted qualitative interviews with participants. Thirty-two telephone interviews were conducted extending for 15–20 minutes and I received 38 written questionnaires in response to my questions.

Findings – The findings are outlined in sub-chapter headings, including increased tuition does not equal increased aid, older students borrow less and take longer in programs tailored to their needs, new graduates unlikely to pay off their loans soon, and students with high undergraduate debt: a divided loan burden. Other findings include interview results, which are embedded within the chapter.

The final section offers recommendations for LIS programs to lessen the burden for students. These recommendations include better financing information and counseling for students; shorter, more flexible degree programs; apprenticeship model, more pathways for a paraprofessional to professional track; and expand public service loan forgiveness programs.

Originality/Value – This is the first comprehensive qualitative/quantitative study of the cost of library school as well as the debt burden for students. It provides actionable outcomes as well as an analytic framework through which to view the academic debt crisis. It features the voices of librarians from around the country as they struggle through a changing job market and increased monetary burden.

This paper examines the relationship between foreign aid, institutional democracy and poverty. The paper explores the direct effect of foreign aid on poverty and quantifies the facilitating role of democracy in harnessing foreign aid for poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The paper attempts to address the endogenous relationship between foreign aid and poverty by employing the two-stage least squares instrumental variable (2SLS-IV) estimator by using GDP per capita of the top five Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries sending foreign aid to SSA countries scaled by the inverse of the land area of the SSA countries to stimulate an exogenous variation in foreign aid and its components. The initial level of democracy is interacted with the senders’ GDP per capita to also instrument for the interaction terms of democracy, foreign aid and its components.

The results suggest that foreign aid reduces poverty and different components of foreign aid have different effects on poverty. In particular, multilateral source and grant type seem to be more significant in reducing poverty than bilateral source and loan type. The study further reveals that democratic attributes of free expression, institutional constraints on the executive, guarantee of civil liberties to citizens and political participation reinforce the poverty-reducing effects of aggregate foreign aid and its components after controlling for mean household income, GDP per capita and inequality.

The methodological concern related to modeling the effects of foreign aid on poverty is endogeneity bias. To estimate the relationship between foreign aid, democracy and poverty in SSA, this paper relies on a 2SLS-IV estimator with GDP per capita of the top five aid-sending OECD countries scaled by the inverse of land area of the SSA countries as an external instrument for foreign aid. The use of the five top OECD's Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) countries is due to the availability of foreign aid data for these countries. However, non-OECD-DAC countries such as China and South Africa may be important source of foreign aid to some SSA countries.

The findings further suggest that the marginal effect of foreign aid in reducing poverty is increasing with the level of institutional democracy. In other words, foreign aid contributes more to poverty reduction in countries with democratic dispensation. This investigation has vital implications for future foreign aid policy, because it alerts policymakers that the effectiveness of foreign aid can be strengthened by considering the type and source of aid. Foreign aid and quality political institution may serve as an important mix toward the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 and the Africa Union Agenda 2063.

As the global economy faces economic and social challenges, SSA may not be able to depend heavily on foreign partners to finance the region's budget. There is the need for African governments to also come out with innovative ways to mobilize own resources to develop and confront some of the economic challenges to achieve the required reduction in poverty. This is a vision that every country in Africa must work toward. Africa must think of new ways of generating wealth internally for development so as to complement foreign aid flows and also build strong foundation for welfare improvement, self-reliance and sustainable development.

This existing literature does not consider how democracy enhances the foreign aid and poverty relationship. The existing literature does not explore how democracy enhances grants, loans, multilateral and bilateral aid effectiveness in reducing poverty. This paper provides the first-hand evidence of how institutional democracy enhances the poverty-reducing effects of foreign aid and its components. The paper uses exogenous variation in foreign aid to quantify the direct effect of foreign aid and its components on poverty.

This study uses the most recent national data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), 2011–2012 and Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS), 2012–2013 to investigate attrition trends among Black teachers, and Black female teachers in particular, to inform a qualitative analysis of proposed and adopted teacher retention policy interventions. This study asks: Why do Black teachers report leaving, and what would bring them back to the classroom? What working conditions are associated with Black teacher attrition? What policy interventions can meet the needs of Black teachers in having successful and supported teaching experiences? How have these interventions been successful, and what are the considerations for applying them more broadly? We find that Black teacher turnover rates are significantly higher than those of other teachers and that there are several substantive differences in their preparation, school characteristics, and reasons for leaving. We describe policy interventions that target these conditions, such as teacher residencies, loan forgiveness, mentoring and induction, and principal training programs. We include in that discussion the relative benefits and challenges of each implications for policymaking.

The relationship between borrowers and lenders can reveal a lot of information regarding loan pricing, information costs, and competition. In this study, the authors investigate the impact of FinTech lenders on Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan disbursement. Specifically, the authors investigate financial technology companies’ ability to provide loans at greater distances, expanding the available resources for businesses struggling during the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors find that not only were FinTechs able to lend at greater distances, but also they provided loans to firms that were younger and had less bank competition in their headquarters’ zip codes. The results remain consistent and are generalizable to the complete population of PPP loans.

The purpose of this chapter is to expand our understanding of the types of Black families that are using Parent PLUS, the types of institutions that rely on Parent PLUS the most, and the outcomes of students who use Parent PLUS to finance their first year of college.

I used descriptive analyses on several datasets collected by the U.S. Department of Education: IPEDS, BPS:04/09, and NPSAS.

The data revealed that (a) of Parent PLUS borrowers, greater shares of low-income Black families are borrowing than White families; (b) many institutions that serve Black students (including HBCUs) give out small amounts of institutional aid but also have much smaller endowments than non-Black-serving institutions; and (c) many families who borrow in their first year stop borrowing in their second year – and of those who stop borrowing, many transfer institutions.

Serving as a starting point in the conversation to Black families borrowing PLUS, this study is not causal and is limited by the unavailability of student-level data on PLUS borrowers. Estimating from nationally representative studies and examining Black-serving institutions is the next-best approximation.

The efforts to standardize financial aid award letters and provide better consumer information to parents must also include PLUS. Moreover, we need to find sustainable solutions for PLUS-reliant institutions to increase their capacity to provide institutional aid.

This chapter contributes to conversation around a controversial financial aid product that has been largely understudied, and in particular for Black families who borrow PLUS at the highest rates.

This study contributes to a growing body of literature on the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by examining how lender incentives affected prioritization of large borrowers. In addition, this study separately examines incentives for commercial banks and credit unions during the program.

Using 2020 PPP loan data, the authors create a proxy for lender loan prioritization by comparing the skewness statistics of large and small loan distributions. A regression model is used to examine lender reporting incentives and loan prioritization.

Results show that larger borrowers were prioritized in receiving PPP loans earlier. Lenders with financial reporting concerns and commercial banks favored large borrowers to a greater extent.

This study may inform social planners and regulators about the benefits and costs of delegating emergency funding loan decisions to financial institutions.

The authors believe this paper is the first to examine financial institution reporting incentives in relationship to PPP lending practices. It adds novelty by examining lender incentives, while prior research has focused heavily on the economic consequences of the program and how borrower–lender relationships affected loan practices during the program.

Research shows that having student loan debt in retirement is associated negatively with life satisfaction, suggesting that student debt is a bane of retiree well-being. The rationale for this study is to determine the factors related to owing student debt in retirement, given the adverse effects on the well-being of retired households.

The study utilizes pooled cross-sectional data from the 2015 and 2018 U.S. National Financial Capability Study. The empirical analysis uses a sample of retired Americans aged 65 years and older (N = approximately 8,000) and estimates two-block logistic regression models to examine the effects of demographic, socioeconomic and behavioral factors on student loan indebtedness in retirement. A sensitivity analysis is performed for the subsample of retirees holding student debt for their children's education. Statistical interpretations use odds ratios.

The findings indicate that financial literacy, age, homeownership and high subjective financial knowledge are associated with a low likelihood of holding student loan debt in retirement. However, being Black, having postsecondary education, having difficulty covering expenses, having financially dependent children, having high-risk preferences and spending more than income increase the likelihood of holding student debt in retirement. The ensuing discussion will assist financial planners and educators identify practical ways to shape decisions regarding student loan debt in retirement.

The amount of student loan debt is unavailable in the dataset for analysis. One cannot infer causal relations from the study. The factors examined do not reflect the time the student loan was obtained.

The study focuses on the determinants of student loan indebtedness among retired Americans rather than young adults or older adults on the verge of retirement. The paper enhances the understanding of student loan holdings in the decumulation phase of the life cycle. Many US individuals have low retirement savings from which they draw a retirement income. The more the student debt burdens on retired Americans, the greater the likelihood of outliving their resources and experiencing poverty.