Registrar General's Department Research Articles

Auditing Services and SME Financial Performance: The Moderating Role of Information Technology

Abstract According to numerous studies, small and medium businesses are more financially limited than large businesses due to the lack of audited financial accounts. This study investigates the effects of Audit services on SMEs' financial performance. As a result, to obtain the necessary data for the project, the study used a quantitative strategy and a survey method. The study's participants are registered SMEs from the Registrar General's Department. The sample size was determined using a list of 6,000 registered small and medium businesses. The SMEs were chosen through a systematic selection process and were given questionnaires. The PLS-SEM Software was used to analyse the data collected from the respondents. The findings indicate that the use of audit services results in the avoidance and detection of financial irregularities, resulting in an improvement in SMEs' financial performance. The study also found a positive relationship between information technology and the financial performance of SMEs. Keywords: Audit Services, Small and Medium Scale Enterprise (SME), Financial Performance, information technology.

Assessing the Effectiveness of E-Government Services in Ghana

The adoption and implantation of electronic government service are on the rise as government services to citizens through electronic means has increased. However, assessing the effectiveness of e-government systems is still limited in the literature. This study sort to evaluate the effectiveness and benefits of information systems (E-registrar) at the Registrar General Department (RGD) in Ghana, using the updated DeLone and McLean IS Success Model. Via the purposive sampling technique, data for the study were collected from 102 staff of RGD and analyzed following the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) technique. The results of the study indicate that Service Quality, System Quality, and Information Quality positively influence System Usage and User Satisfaction. Also, System Usage and User Satisfaction positively influence the Net Benefits derived from the E-Registrar system. The findings provide a relevant recommendation to policymakers and management of organizations when it comes to information systems implementation.

Status, challenges and prospects of food processing equipment fabricators in Ghana

To facilitate effective provision of government support to local fabricators and improve their exposure to prospective clients in order to boost their productivity, it is necessary to understand the challenges currently impeding existing businesses as well as prospects at play with a view to identifying and promoting some recommendations and suggestions. The study explored the status, challenges and prospects of food processing equipment fabricators in three regions of Ghana: Greater Accra, Ashanti and Volta. The research generated an updated database of fabricators, identified relevant challenges and prospects, and established a relationship between the education level of respondents and the types of food processing equipment fabricated. A total of 101 fabricators answered the structured questionnaire. Majority of respondents (81%) were married. 41% had junior high school and 20% senior high school education. Farming (31%) and trading (23.8%) provided the highest secondary sources of income to fabricators. 953 dependents were found to be direct beneficiaries of income generated from fabrication works. 33 food processing equipment were recorded with the fufu extruder and cassava grater obtaining the highest frequencies. 33.9% of respondents had not registered their businesses with the Registrar General's Department. Cross reference analysis depicted that education level of fabricators influenced the types of equipment fabricated; most especially in the fabrication of palm fruit boilers. The work recommends downward review of electricity and import tariffs of fabrication raw materials and machine spare parts, regular capacity building programs, and reduced requirements for company registration and association membership to boost productivity in the sector.

Improving the Policy Utility of Cause of Death Statistics in Sri Lanka: An Empirical Investigation of Causes of Out-of-Hospital Deaths Using Automated Verbal Autopsy Methods.

Background: Setting public health policies and effectively monitoring the impact of health interventions requires accurate, timely and complete cause of death (CoD) data for populations. In Sri Lanka, almost half of all deaths occur outside hospitals, with questionable diagnostic accuracy, thus limiting their information content for policy.Objectives: To ascertain whether SmartVA is applicable in improving the specificity of cause of death data for out-of-hospital deaths in Sri Lanka, and hence enhance the value of these routinely collected data for informing public policy debates.Methods: SmartVA was applied to 2610 VAs collected between January 2017 and March 2019 in 22 health-unit-areas clustered in six districts. Around 350 community-health-workers and 50 supervisory-staffs were trained. The resulting distribution of Cause-Specific-Mortality-Fractions (CSMFs) was compared to data from the Registrar-General's-Department (RGD) for out-of-hospital deaths for the same areas, and to the Global-Burden-of-Disease (GBD) estimates for Sri Lanka.Results: Using SmartVA, for only 15% of deaths could a specific-cause not be assigned, compared with around 40% of out-of-hospital deaths currently assigned garbage codes with “very high” or “high” severity. Stroke (M: 31.6%, F: 35.4%), Ischaemic Heart Disease (M: 13.5%, F: 13.0%) and Chronic Respiratory Diseases (M: 15.4%, F: 10.8%) were identified as the three leading causes of home deaths, consistent with the ranking of GBD-Study for Sri Lanka for all deaths, but with a notably higher CSMF for stroke.Conclusions: SmartVA showed greater diagnostic specificity, applicability, acceptability in the Sri Lankan context. Policy formulation in Sri Lanka would benefit substantially with national-wide implementation of VAs.

Successor selection in family business using theory of planned behaviour and cognitive dimension of social capital theory: evidence from Ghana

PurposeSuccession of family enterprises has been an issue of concern to a number of researchers, and extensive studies have been conducted on this. Transfer of family business from one generation to next has resulted in collapse of most family business in both developed and developing economies. This study looked at succession in family enterprise in Ghana using theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) and cognitive dimension of social capital theory to know the intention of founder/incumbent to hand over the family business to an internal successor.Design/methodology/approachOur target population for this study is family businesses run in Ghana, Western region. Ghana is not having statistical database on family businesses; therefore, the study relied on the database of registered SMEs which was gotten from Registrar General's Department, Ghana. This is the government department that is in charge of registering business in Ghana. A sample of 596 was used and received a response rate of 60%. The study used structural equation model to find out how the variables correlate to discover the intention of the founder/successor on internal succession.FindingsIt was discovered that intention of founder/incumbent to hand over to an internal successor is predominantly determined by attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control and cognitive dimension of the social capital. Trust does not influence the intention of founder/incumbent but attitude; this rejects the findings of most researchers.Research limitations/implicationsMost family enterprises were not registered, which made it difficult to reach out to all family businesses. This limited the authors approach to only the registered family enterprises.Practical implicationsFamily firms are the backbone of any economy, which comprise mostly of SMEs. Therefore, the understanding of succession by incumbents/founders as well as policymakers enhances firms' value and continuity.Originality/valueThe study was conducted in Africa, Ghana in particular, owing to the limited studies in this region.

Economic costs of alcohol use in Sri Lanka.

AimAlcohol related disease conditions are responsible for a significant proportion of morbidity and mortality in Sri Lanka. This study quantified the economic cost of selected alcohol related disease conditions in Sri Lanka in 2015.MethodsThis study uses the prevalence-based cost of illness methodology specified by the World Health Organization, and uses the gross costing approach. The direct costs includes the costs of curative care (inpatient and outpatient care borne by the state and out of pocket expenditure borne by patients) for alcohol related diseases, weighted by the respective population attributable fractions. Indirect costs consist of lost earnings due to absenteeism of the patient and carers due to seeking care and recuperation, and the loss of income due to mortality.Data form the Ministry of Health, Registrar General’s Department, Department of Census and Statistics and the National Cancer Registry was used. Systemic and house costs and population attributable fractions were obtained from research studies. Economists, Public Health Experts, Medical Administrators and Clinical Specialists were iteratively consulted during the estimation and validation of the costs and the results.ResultsThe estimated present value of current and future economic cost of the alcohol-related conditions for Sri Lanka in 2015 was USD 885.86 million, 1.07% of the GDP of that year. The direct cost of alcohol related disease conditions was USD 388.35 million, which was 44% of the total cost, while the indirect cost was USD 497.50 million, which was 66% of the total cost. Road Injury cost was the highest cost category among the conditions studied.ConclusionAddressing alcohol use and its harms through effective implementation of evidence-based polices and interventions is urgently required to address the economic costs of alcohol use in Sri Lanka as it imposes a significant burden to the country.

Automated Business Name Reservation and Registration System - A Case Study of Registrar General's Department, Ghana

a business in Ghana has over the years been the greatest challenge of most entrepreneurs and investors, both local and expatriates. The current system in use at various branches of the Registrar General's Department do not synchronize properly with their central database and checking for redundancy of data takes a lot of time. This paper therefore seeks to develop an automated business name reservation and registration system which will provide a conducive mean of registering business in real time. Four main phases were involved in this project, namely planning phase, analysis phase, design phase, and implementation phase. The functionalities of the system are presented by UML diagrams that consist of a use case diagram and sequence diagram. A database was created with MySQL software to manage the registration process and an interactive web component was added to enable people to make reservations. The system was finally deployed at the Registrar General's Department of Ghana and evaluations show that it is very reliable, time saving and user friendly. It also provides extensive reporting and business intelligence.

Identifying Maternal Deaths in Developing Countries: Experience in Jamaica

Multiple sources were used to identify maternal deaths and their causes in a study carried out in Jamaica. These sources of information included a review of all deaths of women aged 12 to 49 years and included those occurring in hospitals (on maternity, surgical and medical wards and in casualty departments); reported to coroners' offices and the police; on whom post-mortems were carried out at hospitals, public morgues and for the Ministry of National Security; obtained from interviews with public health staff in all parishes and which were registered with the Registrar General's Department. Some 193 maternal deaths were identified giving a maternal mortality rate of 10 per 10,000 live births. No one source independently identified all maternal deaths. Hospital in-patient records yielded 133 deaths (69%), death certificates 74 (38%). Deaths due to certain causes were far more likely to be identified from particular sources eg those due to clinical mismanagement (complications of anaesthesia and blood transfusion) from hospital in-patient records; while deaths from ruptured ectopic pregnancy were more likely to come from coroners', police and morgue records. It is concluded that using multiple sources to identify maternal deaths in developing countries is an effective method to identify all maternal deaths.

The measurement of inequities in health: Lessons from the British experience

There has been an acrimonious debate about trends in inequality in health in the U.K. over the last couple of years. Whilst the acrimony is highly specific to the U.K. context, the terms of the debate contain general lessons for others who would venture into the same territory. This paper has focused on problems with using occupational classifications, with using groups of different size, with assessing trends in inequalities in death, with the measurement tool employed, with comparing patterns of ill-health and with the framework of explanation. The U.K. debate provides a good example of the first problem. Much of the debate has had to rely on the classification of occupation at the time of death by the Registrar General's Department. The scheme used was devised in 1911 and has persisted despite the massive changes in occupational structure since then. The groups now contain different occupational titles (2.1), and it is not at all clear what is being referred to by the RG scheme (2.2). Moreover, the balance of the RG groups has shifted dramatically (3.1). Any scheme applied regularly and routinely to mortality statistics over time will have these problems—it is not surprising that it is very difficult to interpret patterns of class death rates (3.2). The argument over trends in the U.K. has sometimes focused exclusively on the measurement tool—the standardized mortality ratios. Various alternatives have been proposed, in particular the Gini coefficient (4.1) which clearly answers a different, possibly rather uninteresting, question. The correct way of comparing ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ is to devise a method which produces a group of constant size in the different communities or at different times (4.2). The focus on death rather than survivorship is queried (4.3) as is the usual restriction to comparing rates of early death (4.4). Possibilities of comparing patterns of ill-health are examined in the fifth section. Whilst routine health care data or survey morbidity data are invaluable (5.1), it seems highly unlikely that they can be compared between communities or over time (5.2). The alternative is to develop a series of ‘risk’ indicators and these are discussed in Section 5.3. The examination of patterns of inequalities in death and ill-health highlights the complexity of discussing aetiology. We consider the balance between long-term and short-term effects and the possible role of (ill)-health on the social mobility process (6.1), and problems of directly relating low income to poor health (6.2).

Fertility trends in Sri Lanka and future prospects.

Using data obtained from the Censuses of 1963 and 1971, the Socio-Economic Survey conducted from November 1969 to October 1970 and the Registrar General's Department, this paper analyses fertility trends in Sri Lanka during the period 1960–72 with special reference to the sub periods 1963–70 and 1963–71. The analysis indicates that changes in the proportion of women marrying was the most significant factor in the decline in the crude birth rate during 1963–70 and 1963–71. In the discussion on future prospects, attention is focused on the increase in contraceptive use from 1973 onwards together with other factors such as further postponement of marriage for women, a higher level of spinsterhood and emigration. The adverse effects on future fertility reduction of progressively larger female cohorts entering the main child-bearing years (20–34) are also discussed.

Computerisation in the Registrar General's Office of New South Wales and some related observations

Abstract This paper gives a brief outline of the progress of automation of land data in the Registrar General's Department and some observations on related matters such as land data banks, survey information and boundary definition.