Athenia Bongani Sibindi

The study aimed to examine the significance of perceived trust dimensions in explaining insurance inclusion in Uganda. Insurance inclusion remained very low in Uganda. Although trust is vital for insurance inclusion, it is not known whether all of its dimensions are relevant for insurance inclusion. As such, hierarchical regression analysis was adopted to investigate the predictive power of the individual dimensions of perceived trust on insurance inclusion. The significance of the individual components was attained by determining the change in the adjusted R2 and the significance of the change. Hence, the results showed that integrity (β = 0.316, p < 0.01), credibility (β = 0.252, p < 0.01) and reliability (β = 0.211, p < 0.01) were significant positive predictors of insurance inclusion. However, the results showed benevolence (β = 0.018, p > 0.05) to have an insignificant positive influence on insurance inclusion in Uganda. The effect of benevolence on insurance inclusion was practically and statistically insignificant. Overall results showed that independent variables explained 50.6% of the variance in insurance inclusion in Uganda when combined. Unlike prior studies that have investigated the general effect of trust as the global variable, the current study examined the impact of the independent dimensions of trust in explaining insurance inclusion. Besides, earlier studies ignored the trust theory, which provides key dimensions for understanding trust. The current study reveals that not all dimensions of perceived trust are significant for insurance inclusion in Uganda.

Analysts continue to demand explanations for the continuous flow of depositors’ and investors’ funds to persistently underperforming banks, while universal banking is premised on the ability to outperform the market. This study examines the effect of bank-level factors on the profitability of banks under changing economic conditions, using a dynamic panel system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) technique for panel data collected from 18 universal banks in Ghana. The data collection period was from 2007 to 2021. The analysis revealed that lagged return on assets, capital adequacy ratio, and deposit to total asset ratio have a positive influence on bank profitability, whereas lagged return on equity, bank size, expenditure, and asset quality negatively impact profitability. While the effect of these variables on profitability is expected considering the literature, the evidence obtained for asset quality is inconsistent with the explanations in the literature as an increase in asset quality is expected to drive an impressive trend in profitability. Furthermore, a negative relationship was found to exist between economic growth and bank performance when economic expansion exerts a deteriorating effect on the returns on bank assets. This can be linked to the dispersion of investors’ and customers’ funds to other investments, which limits the amount of funds available to the banks to grant credits for interest income. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that bank-specific dynamics adapt to changes in economic conditions which can be explained by the normative guidelines of the Adaptive Market Hypothesis.