Journal of Economics, Management and Trade

International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders or territories, which could involve the activities of the government and individual. In Africa and Ghana to be specific, it is through international trade that items like automobiles, mobile phones, and other sophisticated machines are acquired. Along the West African belt, trade has been very key in the lives of the individual. However, different languages are used across the West African sub-region. Major amongst these languages are French, English, Twi , Hausa, and Ewe. The success of traders in the sub-region depends greatly on their ability to communicate either in written or oral form one of the aforementioned languages. Due to this barrier traders usually resort to interpreters to aid their trading activities. Meanwhile, these interpreters are not benevolent organizations-they also work at a charge. The primary gravity equation was modified to include the cost of individual activities such as Cost of interpreters, Transportation cost, and accommodation cost. GDP and Transportation cost are very crucial in Trade. International languages also put a cost on traders as interpreters charge about USD 8.11 on average. Governments may involve themselves by way of trade agreements to ease the trading between their respective countries and also promote language in Schools.

In Ghana, the banking industry is now characterised by increasing competition and innovation. This has made most of the banks to adopt a scientific approach to improve the quality of their loan structure. The decline of relevant portfolio planning models especially in Ghana is attributed mainly to the evolving dynamics of the Ghanaian banking industry where the regulatory controls have changed with a high frequency. Due to the model used in allocating funds to various loan types, a lot of banks had suffered substantial losses from some bad loans in their portfolio. As a result, most banks are not able to maximize their profit on loans due to poor allocation of funds. The purpose of this study is to develop a linear programming model using the Karmarkar's projective scaling algorithm to help Capital Rural Bank Limited to maximise their profit on loans. The results from the model showed that Capital Rural Bank Limited would be making annual loan turn-over of GH¢5,961,300.00 which is 61.3% more than the established previously. From the study, it was further realised that policy directions mostly influence the optimal solution and not probability of bad debt.

Aim: The objectives of this explanatory study are to investigate the profile of EPF contributors; existing and past employees demographically and analyze their established views towards the Malaysia’s EPF scheme covering the social aspects.

Methodology: In this study, primary data were collected using a self-reported survey. A quantitative method was accordingly employed given a total sample of 300 existing and past employee respondents under a snowball sampling procedure.

Results: Among others, this study reveals that there are greater tendencies by employees to overuse available access to making various pre-retirement withdrawals during employment not specifically meant for retirement purposes.

Conclusion: Large past employees and incremental numbers of existing employees, who utilized different types of pre-retirement withdrawals of EPF scheme, respectively, are found to be exposed to the risk of not having adequate incomes at retirement. Therefore, the government and policy makers are recommended to increase the eligibility requirement levels in making pre-retirement withdrawals among the employees with necessary supervisions so that the pressing issue on the fast depletion of funds available at retirement can be mitigated.

Aims: Tomato is a major vegetable that is being produced and consumed almost all over the world. Consumer preference from imported to local tomato was analysed for Benin Republic within this study. The main objective was to determine factors affecting consumers’ willingness to pay for locally grown tomato in exchange of imported tomato.

Study Design and Place: It was intended to measure consumer reflections via a face to face survey. Therefore, a structured consumer survey was prepared and applied in Cotonou, the economic capital of Benin Republic.

Methodology: Hedonic pricing methodology was applied to the data retrieved from 223 consumers in Cotonou of Benin Republic in 2017. The main stance of hedonic pricing was to estimate impact of relevant consumer and market related factors on purchasing decision of tomato consumers.

Results and Conclusion: It was understood that 65 % of the sample had willingness to pay more to local tomato than the imported one. The average accepted premium was 0.30 Dollars. The price climbs up to 0.66 Dollars for 250 grams of tomato, with addition of the standard packed imported tomato price, which was 0.36 Dollars. When all factors were held constant, households accepted to pay 0.12 Dollars to local tomato. Local tomato preference, being employed and having aged between 18 and 45 affected the willingness to pay positively. However, medium-size and hard tomato preference were deterrent factors. When the income effect was considered, it was understood that local tomato price is income inelastic and consumers would be paying 11 % more in response to 100 % rise in their income. This confirms the normal good characteristic of tomato.

Linear regression method is one of the methods for assessing real estate batch. The defects of simple linear regression method are analyzed concretely in this paper, by selecting Foshan city real estate trading information for samples with empirical method. Equal linear regression is applied to analyze the housing prices in Foshan, by comparing the effect of linear regression and standard regression analysis of data, observing different regression models, analyzing the impact of pings number, room number, hall number, number of bathrooms and the age of the building variables on housing prices, to improve the linear regression method. The results show that if using the standard square regression to analyze, there may be undervalued and overvalued, which cannot correctly reflect what is the real factors that influence the estate price. This paper found that in the high-priced estate, if using the standard linear regression to estimate there, the number of rooms and the age of the building will be undervalued, and the number of bathrooms will be overvalued.