Research
On the Investigation of Awareness Level of Family Planning among Rural Dwellers in Nigeria (Principal Component Analysis Approach)
This study examined the awareness level and attitude of family planning among rural dwellers in the South western part of Nigeria and its consequences on population/economy of Nigeria. Data were gathered from 300 respondents who were randomly selected from Seriki rural communities of western Nigeria using proportional allocation of the stratified random sampling technique. The research considered to know the level of awareness between the traditional family planning methods and modern methods of contraception. The modern methodswere found to be more significantly embraced than traditional family planning methods based on the analysis of the result obtained which shows that 175% prefer modern methods while 125% preferred traditional methods. The factors considered in examining these are educational background, economic factors, marital status, social factor, ethnicity and illiteracy level; the data collected based on these factors was analyzed using principal component analysis technique in order to determine the most prevalent factor that causes attitudinal problems.The results give rise to the Eigen values and Eigen vectors of the components, whereby the variance proportion for each is given as 0.4844, 0.2391, 0.1480, 0.0597, 0.0461 and 0.0227 for economics, educational background, ethnicity, illiteracy, marital status and social status respectively; thereby qualified the factors as first PC, second PC, third PC, fourth PC, fifth PC and the sixth PC respectively. Thus,economic factor which is the first PC is the factor that is predominantly responsible for the discovered low level of awareness and poor attitudinal behavior towards family planning.
On the Investigation of Determinant Variables on Economic Growth Rate in Some African Countries using Panel Data Analysis Approach
In most African Countries, increase in Gross Domestic Products (GDP) has not translated to economic growth and development. For some decades had a lot of contestson economic growth and development has been a serious issues.The focus of this study is to analysing the effects of economic determinants on economic growth rate in some African Countries by employing panel data analysis. Yearly data were used from 1990 to 2013 time period. The data was obtained from the world economic outlook database of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for probing the effects of these variables on growth rate in some selected African countries which include: Nigeria, Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cape-Verde, Cameroun, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic Of Congo, Cote di’ Voire, Egypt, Equatorial-Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, and Uganda. The effects of 6 macroeconomic variables on GDP were critically examined. We used 37 Countries GDP as our dependent variable and 6 independent variables use d in this study include: Total Investment (totinv), Inflation (inf),Population (popl), current account balance (cab), volume of imports of goods and services (vimgs), and volume of exports of goods and services (vexgs). The results of our analysis shows that total investment, population and volume of exports of goods and services strongly affect the economic growth. We noticed that population of these selected countries positively affect the GDP while total investment and volume of exports negatively affect GDP. On the contrary, inflation, current account balance and volume of imports of goods and services’ contribution to the GDP are insignificant. The results of this study would be useful for individual African governments for developing a suitable and appropriate economic policies and
On the Estimation of Crime Rate in the Southwest of Nigeria: Principal Component Analysis Approach
Crime is at alarming rate in this part of world and there are many factors that are contributing to this antisocietal behavour both among the youths and old. In this work, principal component analysis (PCA) was used as a tool to reduce the dimensionality and to really know those variables that were crime prone in the study region. Data were collected on twenty-eight crime variables from National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) databank for a period of fifteen years, while retaining as much of the information as possible. We use PCA in this study to know the number of major variables and contributors to the crime in the Southwest Nigeria. The results of our analysis revealed that there were eight principal variables have been retained using the Scree plot and Loading plot which implies an eight-equation solution will be appropriate for the data. The eight components explained 93.81% of the total variation in the data set. We also found that the highest and commonly committed crimes in the Southwestern Nigeria were: Assault, Grievous Harm and Wounding, theft/stealing, burglary, house breaking, false pretence, unlawful arms possession and breach of public peace.
