The study was conducted to assess the impact of cooperative society in reducing unemployment in Delta State, Nigeria. The list of all registered Cooperative Societies was obtained from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Twenty eight 28 cooperatives societies were randomly selected. The next stage was the random selection of ten respondents from each of the 28 cooperative societies comprising of 280 respondents. Both secondary and primary sources of data collection were used for the study. The primary data involved the use of structured questionnaire. Secondary data include journals, magazines and textbooks. Data was analyzed with Chi-Square. The result showed that males constitute 56 percent of the population, while the remaining 44 percent were females. On age of the respondents majority (77%) belong to the age bracket of 25-50 years. The rest were either above 50 years (19%) or below 25 years (4%). The marital status of the respondents showed that about 68 percent of them were married, 14 percent of them were single and 18 percent were either divorced or widowed. The survey of the farm income revealed that about 24 percent had less than N 100,000.00 as annual farm income, 38 percent had between N 150,000.00 and N200, 000.00, 38 percent had above N200, 000.00 annual farm incomes. The study further revealed that 71 percent of the respondents had been in cooperative business for less than 11 years, 23 percent had been member of cooperative societies for the past 11 to 20 years and the remaining 6 percent had cooperative experience of above 20 years. The average years of cooperative experience for the area was 9 year. The findings also showed that cooperative society was formed in the state with the objective of solving problems in order to meet the needs and aspiration of members through capital formation and mobilization. The result further revealed that a total of N 43,343,920.00 was generated by all the members of the 28 agricultural cooperative societies involved in the study, that is about 88 percent of the fund came from sixteen cooperative societies that make up farmers multipurpose and thrift and credit societies. The remaining 12 percent of the fund were contributed by the other twelve societies. A critical analysis of the result showed that average capital per member involve in the study was estimated to be N 61,047.77. The chi-square analysis on the impact of cooperative societies on employment generation showed that there is a significant impact (chi-square value = 51.8). Therefore, the young and agile graduates in Delta state can take advantage and reap of the substantial benefits of cooperative society in job creation especially as the unemployment situation in Delta State and Nigeria is worsening.
This study was conducted in Delta State to examine the consumption and expenditure patterns of public servants in Delta State. One hundred and twenty (120) respondents were randomly selected from Delta State Polytechnic Ozoro, sixty (60) each for junior and senior staff respectively. Structured questionnaires were administered to a cross section of the respondents. The data obtained were analyzed using the ordinary least squares method of multiple regression analysis, T-test statistic, deriving marginal propensity to consumer coefficients from simple regression model. The study revealed that female, (55%) constitute the majority of the employees in the study area. Most of the workers are young and energetic and represented the active labour force. Majority (69.17%) of the workers are married which indicated that a substantial part of their income was devoted to family upkeep. The empirical results further showed that there was a significant relationship between food consumption and expenditure on savings, investment, education, transportation and house rent at (p<0.05). It was further observed that workers spend more money on food and other things as they receive their salary. However, the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of low income workers was 0.786 while those of high income workers was 0.965 showing that both groups set aside a large proportion of their income on consumption. It can be concluded that most public servants in Delta State spend more of their income on food, transportation, rent, among others than saves invest. Recommendations are therefore made to encourage workers to save and invest through periodic wage reviews, staff motivation and education, checking the rate of inflation and provision of adequate food at affordable prices.