PurposeThe purpose of this study is to measure the effect of land degradation and the environmental changes on agricultural productivity in Somalia, as well as the other factors that affect crop production in Somalia.Design/methodology/approachCobb-Douglas production function assumes crop production as a dependent variable and land degradation, labor, capital, fertilizer and climate change as the explanatory variables. In this study time-series data (1962–2017) collected from the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Development Indicators were used. The unit root of the data was examined using Ng-Perron and the Lee-Strazicich methods to explore the unit root property of the breaks. Structural breaks are observed using the Chow test, and the long-run relationship between the variables is examined using Gregory and Hanssen's approach.FindingsThis study found that land degradation and climate change have a negative relationship with agriculture production in Somalia. Land degradation leads to the decline in agricultural production as the loss of one hectare of land due the depletion causes agriculture production of Somalia to fall by about five percent. Climate changes and warming of the environment lead to the reduction of agriculture production. One degree Celsius rise in the temperature leads to a three percent decline in agricultural production. Capital contributes immensely to agricultural production as one unit of additional capital raises production by seven percent. The contribution of labor to agricultural production is limited because of land contractionPractical implicationsLand degradation is a significant contributor to the decline of agricultural production. As land degradation continues to worsen, rural poverty increases, which in turn causes the rural migration and the social conflict. The government should develop land improvement programs such as increasing market orientation of the farmers, encourage private sector engagement in agribusiness and establish a regulatory framework of the land uses.Originality/valueThis study examines the structure of the time-series and specifies the break periods to determine when and where significant and sudden changes occurred within land degradation and agricultural production. The study employs advanced econometric methods, namely, Ng-Perron method and the Lee-Strazicich method to test the unit root property of the breaks. It also examines the long-run relationship between the variables using Gregory and Hanssen's approach.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to decompose total factor productivity (TFP) changes of the agriculture sector in ten African countries. Design/methodology/approach A fixed-effects estimation is applied to estimate the translog production function. Findings The study results are consistent with previous studies, indicating low TFP. Furthermore, of the TFP components, only technical change (TC) is positive. This study proposes that credit be made available to farmers in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Furthermore, agricultural development programs should be implemented in South Africa and Senegal to improve TFP in these countries. Originality/value This study measures the following TFP components for the African agriculture sector: TC, technical efficiency, and scale effects.

No abstract

Financial technology is a crucial component for developing the financial sector, which has an undulating effect on the economy's well-being. The financial institutions enable the economic agents to invest in the real sector to boost productivity and drive economic growth. This paper examines the causal link between mobile money and carbon emission in Somalia to discover if mobile money can be used to control pollution and tackle environmental deterioration. This study uses quarterly data spanning from 2012 to 2020. This study used the ARCH model to analyze the conditional variance of time series with the nature of the temporal dependence. This study found that mobile money is negatively associated with carbon emissions, while population growth, affluence, urbanization, and energy consumption increase pollution, negatively affecting the environment. Mobile money has the potential to be used for pollution control as it offers access to clean and affordable energy sources that lessen carbon emissions. This study found that mobile money has a causal relationship with carbon emissions, and their relationship is unidirectional. Our results show that mobile money is an affordable tool to provide financial services such as insurance, credit saving, remittance, and government transfers to those dealing with environmental realities.

The purpose of this study was to examine relationship between environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and civil conflict in Somalia. Environmental degradation is disposed to increase the number of disputes emerging from duel over the scarce resources. Consequently, it makes the society such offensive that it is inclined to armed conflict. In this study we investigated five variables in which civil conflict was the dependent variable. Population growth, land degradation, water resource and the climate change were explanatory variables. Time series data, 1990-2015, from various sources was employed. Regression methods, Ordinary Least Square was used to estimate the model parameters. Augmented Dickey-Fuller test was used to examine stationary of the data as Johansen cointegration was used to detect the long run relation between the study variables. The study found that one million increase of the rural population will lead the likelihood of the civil conflicts by about 1.04%. The decline of every one hector of arable land will cause the likelihood of the civil conflict to increase by about 1.5%. The rise of the one kilometer cubic of fresh water decreases the likelihood of the civil conflicts to about 4.49%. Rise of the temperature came to be insignificant and has no contribution to the civil conflicts in Somalia.