Employment security and workers' moonlighting behavior in Ghana
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of employment security on moonlighting in Ghana as a means to inform policy on enforcing issues of employment security.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper followed the work of Shishko and Rostker (1976) by applying their approach to the sixth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey data. The paper created an employment index from four variables and used the ordered logit as the main estimation technique.
Findings – The findings indicated that, as a person with a single job becomes more secured in employment, the likelihood of moonlighting is decreased by 0.03, while for those with two and three or more jobs, the likelihood of moonlighting increased by 0.0297 and 0.0008, respectively, with increasing employment security. This implies that, workers can be made to stick to single jobs by providing them with higher levels of employment security, but once they take on two or more jobs, providing them with employment security will engender the tendency to increase their moonlighting behavior the more.
Originality/value – With the current harsh economic conditions in the country and the urgent need for multiple jobs (moonlighting) as a risk coping mechanism, little has been done on the role employment security plays as a catalyst or otherwise. This paper fills the gap by employing a comprehensive index on employment security in the case of Ghana.
Re-examining Bhagwati hypothesis: the case of some selected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
Bhagwati hypothesis opines that the overall impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth is conditioned on countries' level of integration with the international market. We test this hypothesis for some selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Does this hypothesis hold given our sample evidence? Yes! No! Maybe! We explain why. By invoking the sample splitting and threshold estimation technique, we find that the two measures of openness (trade openness and exports) mediate the FDI-economic growth relationship in three countries and this is an indication of complete Bhagwati hypothesis in these countries. Also, we find that, given the measure of openness, four countries exhibit incomplete Bhagwati hypothesis. Finally, we find no support for the Bhagwati hypothesis for most countries. Based on these findings, we argue that the validity of the Bhagwati hypothesis may be contingent on both country characteristics and the indicator of openness.