Janet Ama Dzator

• PhD
• University of Newcastle Australia

Alleviating rural energy poverty and inequality in rural-urban energy accessibility is a panacea for rural economic development. Researchers and policymakers have underscored the importance of remittances in socioeconomic development; however, the role of remittances on rural energy poverty and disparity in rural-urban energy access remains under-r...

Access to energy is widely known to promote socio-economic development; however, the linkage between access to energy and gender equality in education and the channels through which energy poverty affects gender equality in education is not explored much in the empirical literature. We, therefore, examine whether access to electricity and clean coo...

We examine the impact of democracy and governance on rural electrification and rural access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking using comprehensive panel data of 34 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean between 2000 to 2020. Evidence from heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variable regression revealed that governance improves ru...

This study utilized instrumental variable techniques and the Driscoll-Kraay estimator to examine the effect of democracy and natural resources on income inequality using a comprehensive panel dataset from 43 sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The findings from our empirical analysis indicated that natural resources and democracy indices such as electoral, l...

In the development literature, the impact of remittances on educational outcomes is a contentious topic and remains at the heart of policy discussions on enhancing quality education in developing countries. Bangladesh being one of the world’s top remittance recipients, it’s crucial to understand the influence of remittances on educational outcomes...

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 requires countries to end poverty of all forms. At the same time, SDG 9 target 9.c calls for increasing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access and striving to provide universal and affordable access to the internet in the least developed countries by 2020. While the existing studies have explo...

The income inequality-economic growth linkage is a topical issue in economics and policy discussions. Both theoretical and empirical results on the impact of income inequality on economic growth have been controversial. One of the criticisms of the existing studies relates to using cross-sectional data and linear estimation techniques for empirical...

This research study explores this original phenomenon for proposing a new concept that will act as an overarching descriptor of innovation types: idea, object and behaviour. This proposed concept, relating to intangible innovation, will explain the sequence within one or many connected intangible activities that provide novelty to its end user rela...

This paper examines the effects of income inequality and governance on access to electricity using a panel of 43 SSA countries from 1990-2017. The results from the two-step GMM estimator revealed that while income inequality substantially reduced access to electricity, governance has been ineffective in improving it. The findings showed that govern...

This study investigates the impact of transport infrastructure and technological innovation on economic growth (GDP), energy consumption (EC) and carbon emissions (CO2e) in the European Union (EU) using the dynamic system-generalised method of moment and data from 1995 to 2019. The results indicate that EC unidirectionally increases GDP, while GDP...

Recent scholarly and policy discussions have focused on whether information and communication technology (ICT) and transport infrastructure enhance human development outcomes in developing countries. This study contributes to the knowledge and policy by exploring the impact of transport and ICT infrastructure on human development using comprehensiv...

This study contributes to the literature by investigating the effect of environmental degradation on foreign direct investment (FDI) using comprehensive panel data from 103 developing countries between 1970 and 2019. In this study, nine variables, namely, CO2 emissions, total greenhouse gas emissions, methane emissions, PM2.5, nitrous oxide emissio...

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing for over four years, making it difficult to achieve the 2030 agenda to reduce emissions. Also, in recent decades, Australia has been experiencing a rapid increase in economic globalization. The critical question of policy concern is, ‘what are the environmental implications of rapid economic...

The theoretical debate on democracy—environment remains contentious in the environmental politics literature. The existing empirical studies have attempted to explore the effect of democracy on environmental degradation. However, there are limitations in these studies regarding how democracy was measured. Also, the prior empirical studies have been...

Age-friendly cities are crucial to achieve the WHO goal of healthy aging. Such cities promote opportunities for health, participation, and security, thus enhancing quality of life as people age. Older people commonly experience psychosocial challenges such as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, loss of autonomy, grief, fear, and loneliness. Austr...

This study examines the effect of urbanisation on economic growth and carbon emissions in Australia for the period 1960–2019 using Cobb-Douglas production function with a Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares and Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares estimators. The findings indicate that while urbanisation has a significant negative effect on economic gr...

To design and implement effective post-COVID-19 macroeconomics policies to tackle poverty in sub-Saharan African (SSA), policymakers need to understand the factors shaping poverty in the region. This paper investigates the effect of international remittances and financial development on poverty alleviation in 44 SSA countries from 2010 to 2019. The...

Objective: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments globally have introduced policy measures to contain the spread of the virus. Popular COVID-19 containment measures include lockdowns of various forms (aggregated into government response stringency index [GRSI]) and handwashing (HWF). The effectiveness of these policy measures remains unclear...

The phenomenon of innovation has been shifting away from focusing on tangible to intangible modernization with its vitalizing context. This shift appears vitally in innovation developed by individual end-users in organizations and societies, including the exploration of the intangible end-user innovation existence and impact in the household sector...

This study revisits the economic growth–energy consumption thesis by investigating the impact of economic, social, and political globalization on the economic growth–energy consumption nexus in a panel of 23 emerging economies for the period 1970–2015. The results that emanate from an instrumental variable generalized method of moment model suggest...

Renewable energy appears to be the most optimal alternative to fossil fuel and the widely accepted pathway towards climate change mitigation. However, the costs of adopting renewable energy are high, and it appears the wealth of nations, the stages of economic development and growth and institutional willingness and quality are important in winning...

The 2030 agenda for sustainable development makes it a priority for countries to reduce income inequality while ensuring that people have access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy. Up to date, research examining the impact of energy accessibility on income inequality remain scarce. To contribute to knowledge and policy, this study utilizes...

Studies examining the economic implications of natural disasters vary in nature partly because the types of disasters they cover, the periods of disaster, countries or locations of event, and the socioeconomic groups affected are different. Even with similar or same approaches to data collection and the way events are defined, measured, and modeled...

A disaster is the disruption of the normal functioning of a system or community, which causes a strong impact on people, structures, and environment. Disaster can be grouped as man-made and natural. An example of a man-made disaster is a terrorist attack and examples of natural disaster include earthquake, cyclone, wildfire, storm, and flood. There...

Achieving energy efficiency and economic growth while reducing carbon emissions has been the policy goal of most economies. The role of economic institutions in economic growth has increasingly attracted scholarly attention; the extent to which economic institutions are shaping the global move toward sustainable energy consumption and carbon emissi...

This chapter seeks to probe the effect of transportation infrastructure development on carbon (CO2) emissions in 26 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for the time between 1960 and 2018 while accounting for GDP, GDP squared, energy consumption, population size, urbanization, trade openness, financial development...

This study employed the IV-GMM to investigate the impact of air and rail transport infrastructure on the emissions of CO2 in 113 developing countries for the time between 1990 and 2018. Our study established that both air and rail transport infrastructure contribute directly to higher carbon emissions. Indirectly, it was observed that the moderatio...

The increasing frequency of natural disasters and the real-time global coverage of climate-related events and headline news about their damage to property and loss of lives heighten the desires of international organizations, policymakers, and researchers to better understand the impacts of the climate change and natural disaster on economic develo...

Climate change has been the most challenging environmental issue, which has attracted the attention of policymakers and researchers. The increasing concentration of carbon emissions in the atmosphere resulting in climate change has severe implications for development. Despite the global efforts to reduce carbon emissions, global carbon emissions ha...

Over the past decades, the world has experienced an unprecedented increase in carbon emissions resulting in the emergence of climate change as a significant policy concern. Currently, environmental and energy policymakers are assessing carbon emission mitigation strategies through the lens of energy innovation. However, research linking energy inno...

This study investigates the impact of exchange rate misalignment on outward capital flight in Botswana over the period 1980–2015. The study uses the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration and the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) approach to Granger causality. Botswana’s currency misalignment was caused by current account imbalances...

The importance of health to economic growth and development is an undisputed fact. Modern advancement in technology and healthcare has contributed to improved health and productivity, but there are many people who cannot access healthcare in a timely fashion. Factors affecting delays in accessing healthcare include inadequate supply, poor location,...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on total factor productivity (TFP) growth in a developing country, China. Utilising an endogenous growth theoretic framework, we estimate a model using 1328 firm-level data and spanning the period 2003–2008. We find that the productivity gap constrains the impa...

A large number of studies have attempted to discern the causes of low productivity and slow growth in developing countries especially in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The effects of global economic integration, corruption, geography, financial aid and human capital indicators such as education have been widely explored. Despite the significant contribu...

Women’s economic participation has recently been at the centre of the debate on sustainable development. It is a widely held view that women have a strategic role in poverty reduction dynamics. The argument is that when women have equal access to education and full participation in business and economic decision-making, they are a significant drivi...

Health is a major factor in development and it is central to the theory about human capital and endogenous growth. This is because health affects all other economic and development activities. The World Health Organization’s (2003) call for “Health for all” which argues that “everybody needs and is entitled to the highest possible standard of healt...

Poverty reduction remains a big challenge in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) region, and economic growth is seen as a key ingredient to reduce poverty rates. Therefore, the region has been making significant commitments to embrace a more inclusive growth approach through the creation of the SADC Gender Unit as well as the regional...

Under the MDGs, poverty has been reduced but not eradicated. The post-2015 development plan is firming towards poverty eradication not merely to reduce it. One of the most widely held beliefs in development economics is that rapid and sustained economic growth is necessary for lifting living standards which in turn is necessary if poverty is to be...

The share of agriculture in the gross domestic product of (GDP) in many countries has been declining. Yet agriculture still plays an important role in many developing country economies as the sector is a source of employment for an estimated 60 to 70 percent of the population in most developing countries. Most agricultural production in developing...

The delivery of most public services involves direct contact between the service facility and the target population. The location of emergency facilities is one of those public facilities in which the proximity to the target population is very important. Often communities in a service area desire a closer location of facilities such as ambulance st...

Over the past century, the world has rapidly become urbanized, meaning more people now live in urban areas and cities than in rural areas. The mass movement of the rural poor to urban centers and cities has also changed the dynamics of poverty. Scarce employment opportunities, lack of assets, and sudden changes in economic conditions have been prop...

We consider the p-median problem which is to find the location of p-facilities so as to minimize the average weighted distance or time between demand points and service centers. Many heuristic algorithms have been proposed for this problem. In this paper we present a simple new heuristic which is effective for moderately size problem. The heuristic...

Improved understanding of the factors that influence malaria care seeking behaviour is necessary in order to enhance the effectiveness of current malaria control strategies. This paper empirically examines the factors that affect household choice of malaria treatment options in Ghana. The treatment options considered were choice of a public provide...

Weight gain may follow altered eating habits and decreased physical activity in couples beginning to live together. Mutual support and willingness to accept changes in lifestyle at this stage may facilitate positive responses to health promotion. We aimed to compare the effects of a diet and physical activity program in couples using a randomized c...

The expanding importance of health as a global issue has focused attention on the value of applying the concept of Global Public Goods from economics to international health. The Global Public Goods for health concept considers 'goods' i.e. services, technologies and information, such as knowledge of an infectious disease outbreak or control of cli...

This paper reports the results of a study which estimated household willingness to participate in a malaria insurance scheme in Ghana using the contingent valuation method. The study was conducted in two communities representing rural and urban areas of the country. The results indicate a high level of support for the scheme, reflecting the social...

This thesis addresses the issue of malaria care fmancing as a strategy in the control of malaria. Household malaria care seeking behaviour and the factors affecting the choice of treatment options under a user fees scheme, as well as ex ante demand for malaria care at formal health care facilities are investigated. Specifically, the study investiga...

Although malaria or fever (as it is commonly referred to) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in Ghana, the cost of treating the disease in the country has not been well documented. Knowledge about the cost of treating malaria can affect the health care seeking behaviour of people and justify increased expenditure for malaria control. This...

This paper attempts to estimate a disease specific demand function to study the determinants of utilisation of the services of a health care provider or a treatment regiment for malaria. The study adapts a multinomial logit framework to look at both facility characteristics and individual patient features on demand for malaria care in Ghana. The in...

Economic reforms introduced over the1980s and 1990s were expected to improve the economic stance of less developed countries as well as improve poverty and health conditions. There has been remarkable improvement in the macroeconomic performance of some countries. Internal rigidities in trade and exchange rate policies have been addressed in some c...