Self-employment plays a major role in the economic growth of Africa in general and East African countries in particular. It is a major source of new jobs and a way of employing the entrepreneurial abilities of the population. Moreover, self-employment allows people to do what they want and to follow their passion. However, populations in East Africa face various barriers that hinder their ability to start their own business and/or to become self-employed. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine the effects of government quality and economic indicators on self-employment. Data was taken for this study from World Bank’s World Development Indicators, Worldwide Governance Indicators, African development Bank and United Nations Development Program for eight East African countries for 2010-2018. The countries were selected based on the availability of panel data. The fixed effects result indicated that political Stability, control of corruption indices and Voice and accountability, natural logarithm of electricity access, mobile phone subscriptions, people living below income poverty line and primary education enrolment are favorably affecting self-employment in East Africa. The result also shows that the natural logarithm of employment in industry and real GDP growth have negative coefficients. . These findings suggest that in addition to economic and social indicators government quality have greater effect on self-employment in East Africa.

This research is conducted with main aim of assessing the economic consequences of Covid-19 pandemic in Western Ethiopia. Primary data is collected through questionnaire and interview from 320 respondents living in three zones of Western Ethiopia. The study areas (zones) are selected purposively from Oromia region; however, the respondents are sampled by employing random sampling technique. The respondents were stratified as community members, daily laborer, business owners, government sector and NGOs employees. Exploratory research design was adopted to achieve the research objectives. Simple descriptive statistics and ordinary least square regression model are used to analyze and interpret the collected data. The study results disclose that majority of community have good awareness about the pandemic and social interaction is reduced due to social distancing. Majority of respondents realize the negative impact of Covid-19 on their economy; reduction of office services; and reduced access to market; and absence of strong support from the government. The great severity of Covid-19 impacts is failed on daily laborers. The regression result shows that sales, experience in business, education level in years, employment status of the respondent, number of workers in the business and work hours per week are positively and significantly influencing daily income of business owner before and after the pandemic outbreak. It is advised the stakeholders to give frequent follow-up and support particularly for daily laborers and small business holders to reduce the future socio-economic impacts of Covid-19 pandemic.

This article investigates the impact evaluation of Jima Ganati farmers' cooperative union intervention in economic activities which is measured in terms of income and productivity as the best means to improve the living standard of farmers' household. For this, cross-sectional data were collected from 280 households purposively selected from five kebeles consisting of 204 member farmers and 76 non-member farmers. The analytical procedure has involved two stages: in the first stage, descriptive analyses were used to detect existence of difference in various outcome indicators between member farmers and non-member farmers. In the second stage, I applied a semi-parametric impact evaluation method of propensity score matching with some matching algorithms to estimate the impact of the intervention on various impact indicators. Combined use of these alternative estimation techniques has enabled us to arrive at consistent results. Our results show that member farmers scored statistically significant higher maize crop income test score than non-member farmers and they are also identified with statistically significant higher total productivity. Although the crop income and productivity test scores show significant changes, some constraints were identifiedin the economic contributions of the cooperative union to farmersand theseinclude: high turnover of the union mangers, lack of skill in cooperative development, rent seeking behavior of the cooperative leaders, lack oftransparency, Accordingly, a number of recommendations are suggested.

The article investigates the factors affecting customers' adoption decision of mobile banking in Bako Tibe, Ethiopia. The continuous expansion of technological innovations especially in the banking sector have stirred competition which has changed the way businesses operate resulting in the introduction of mobile banking. This is illustrated that Ethiopia is recently expanding the use of internet banking such as mobile banking. To analysis of the determinants of mobile banking adoption in Bako Tibe, open and semi-structured questionnaires were used. The results of binary logit model indicates that quality of internet, lack of awareness, relative advantage, awareness, trial ability, experience, gender, education, income and age are the factors that are significantly influencing customers' adoption decisions of mobile banking at Commercial Bank of Ethiopia. The conclusion is that commercial bank of Ethiopia invests massively in mobile banking and other information technology innovations in order to further promote efficient service delivery and increase adoption of mobile banking services.