Business and Economics Journal

Tobacco is one of the agricultural commodities which is widely produced around the world. In Pakistan out of all the provinces, KPK is famous for tobacco production and particularly district Swabi for the production of the Flue Cured Virginia tobacco; as its agronomic and environmental conditions are suitable for its production. In agriculture sector the improvements in efficiency and introduction of new technology can enhance productivity. Agricultural productivity in the short-term can be enhanced by improvements in efficiency as the acquisition rate of new technology is quite low in Pakistan. The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach is one of the ways to improve the efficiency in agriculture sector. Hence the study is conducted to examine the effect of FFS on efficiency of tobacco growers in the district Swabi. Using the stochastic production frontier approach and propensity score matching technique, the study revealed that FFS played a significant role in enhancing the efficiency of tobacco farmers in Swabi. That is, the tobacco production of the Treated group was significantly greater than that of the Control group. This difference in the efficiency was accountable to the extension visit which is a source of knowledge dissemination among the farmers.

Sierra Leone, which has three-quarters of its 72 million hectares of land suitable for crop production on a sustainable basis and is being classed by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as Low-Income Food Deficit Country (LIFDC) has 57.9% of households engaged in agricultural activities to include crop farming, livestock, poultry, fishing, hunting and exploitation of forest products.

A package of statistical tools for social scientists was used in data collection and analysis. The outcomes of these data when these statistical tools were employed reveal that all the most widely accepted extension services do impact positively agricultural output. Among the reported extension programs, general extension is the most paramount. This is due to the many small farm holders as almost all of them practice mixed cropping. The research also surfaced the challenges that are associated with the adoption of these programs. Among the responses, the most cited issue or challenge has to do with finance followed by inconsistence in monitoring and illiteracy. The rationale for this, as revealed by the search result, is that with adequate funding, demonstration materials could not be a problem. Essential teaching and communication materials would not be an issue too; logistics and recruitment and more training of extension workers would not be seen as challenges.

In the survey,the target population included farmers, extension agents and extension researchers, as well as the Agricltural Extension Services Division (AESD)-Ministry of Agricuture, Forestry and Food Security (MAFFS). Qualitative analyses and social sciences’ statistical tools were employed in the analysis of data collected. The challenges found were although illiteracy of farmers, problems with monitoring, inadequate funding and demonstration materials, etc; but first of, the results showed a positive relation between awareness about extension programs and their adoption . Further, all those implementing the techniques of extension experience much better yields with quality and now have much better living conditions. For those challenges, it is therefore recommended that access to information should be enhanced, much better communication skill training should be given to extension agents and more funds should be made avalable to the AESD-MAFFS.

The relationship between financial instability and economic growth has created an interesting area of research for many years. To identify the financial crisis and economic growth in East Africa researcher use Empirical studies and secondary data. Most empirical findings use GMM, VAR, VECM AND FOLS method to found nexus between financial instability and economic growth. The finding reveals that main measurements of financial crisis are Debt crisis, currency crisis, banking crisis and deficit in general while the root causes of financial crisis are structural unstable monetary system, poor governance, unsustainable fiscal system, misbehavior of economic actors as well as Interest system and fiat money system (Monetary), administered price (Governance), volatile food/Fiscal and Behavior are the most dominant variables to cause financial crisis through Inflation and Growth. Empirical evidence shows that Annual credit growth, Nonperforming loan/total loans, capital adequacy ratio ,Liquid assets/short term liability ,Annual growth of M2 and Stock index volatility are early warning indicator of financial crisis and banking crisis. Thus, Structural reforms are needed in monetary system, fiscal system and governance, as well as in international system, which are more fair, just, stable and sustainable. Moreover, behavior of economic actors should be controlled by market conduct regulation and improved by education. To prevent financial crisis, Central Bank and Government advised to minimize budget Deficit, Debt crisis, currency crisis and banking crisis based on early warning indicators in advance before crisis occurred. Since Loan growth rate, NPL and BOP deficit mainly moving together with aggravate financial crisis, FED ought to see macroeconomic variables and restrict loan growth and financing as necessary.

In this article, we make a brief review of the paper. We focus on discussion the objective function we establish and why we use minimizing total social loss rather than total loss of insured banks as the objective. We also summarize our numerical analysis and illustrate what we find.