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Migration is a common strategy adopted to escape poverty and improve living standards, but it is not without risks and there are no guarantees of success. We analyse the impact of migration on the welfare of migrant-sending households in Ghana by exploring what their living standards might have been had their migrant members remained at home. We do this by estimating a counterfactual consumption distribution for households with migrants. We examine the importance of selection bias and compare results obtained with and without selection controls. We illustrate how sensitive conclusions about the welfare gains of migration are to the decision to address selection issues. We present preliminary results which suggest that estimated gains are sensitive to whether and how we address selection bias. While the uncorrected results suggest an average gain from migration for households with migrants, once we control for potential selection bias we find that on average households with migrants are worse off than they might have been had their members stayed at home. Our selection corrected results also suggest that initially better off households are more likely to experience gains from migration and that poorer households lose out. Our results are consistent with qualitative research conducted with a small sample of migrants from our migrant-sending households.

We present preliminary descriptive statistics and analysis on migrants and their families left behind using a new household survey of Ghana. We provide a profile of current migrants and their households and explore the determinants of migration. Our research suggests that poverty and migration are linked, with poverty determining where households migrate to, and that migration is generally held to be of benefit to households, particularly those with male migrants. Future research will model the counterfactual and seek to estimate to what extent households are better off from having a migrant, and why.

Maternal and child mortalities are among major health problems facing developing countries such as Ghana. Most of these deaths can be avoided by utilization of maternity health care services. The study examines the effect of health insurance holding and other socioeconomic and demographic factors on the choice of health facility for childbirth in Ghana. The study used data from the 2008 Ghana Demographic and Health survey. Data were analyzed for descriptive statistics as well as a Multinomial Logistic Regression for identification of factors that influence delivery in health facility. The study results have shown that, holding of health insurance and wealth significantly influences expectant mother’s decision to use government health facilities for childbirth. Also, the study revealed considerable variations in region and between rural and urban utilization of this services in Ghana. It is recommended that in order to improve the utilization of health facility for childbirth services and hence maternal health care utilization, there is the need to improve public awareness and efforts should also be taking by policy makers to integrate the private sector properly into the National Health Insurance scheme. Policy should also target mothers who have had the experience of child birth on the need to use health care facility services for each pregnancy. The government and other service providers (NGOs, religious institutions and private providers) may endeavor to improve on the distribution of health facilities, human resources, good roads and necessary infrastructure among other things in order to facilitate easy access to health care providers especially for rural dwellers.

In international trade involving agricultural products, attempts to safeguard the health of humans, animals, and plants, have led to the imposition of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards. Due to the fact that groundnuts are susceptible to aflatoxin contamination, stringent aflatoxin standards have been imposed on groundnut trade by many developed countries. For Senegal and other groundnut exporters in the developing world, these aflatoxin standards pose a major challenge. As a result, in Senegal's confectionery groundnut sector, CIRAD (a French scientific organization) has commenced research aimed at developing an aflatoxin-reducing program. This study evaluates the potential economic impact of CIRAD's aflatoxin-reducing program. The hypotheses underlying the study are as follows: (i) The adoption of CIRAD's aflatoxin-reducing program would enhance the welfare of Senegal's confectionery groundnut farmers (ii) An overall welfare net-gain would be derived by Senegal from the adoption of the program. The analysis employs an economic surplus model that incorporates trade, as well as, domestic production and consumption. Various scenarios of program-effectiveness are examined. The results support the hypotheses of the study; besides enhancing farmers' welfare, the adoption of the aflatoxin-reducing program is expected to yield an overall net-gain ranging between US$0.56 million and US$4.25 million. The overall net-gain is, however, very small. Master of Science