This report investigates the implementation of the Further Education and Training (FET) College Act of 2006 whether it achieved the founding purpose of promoting quality education and expansion of equal opportunities for South Africa. The study followed a qualitative comparative case study in which two campuses of one college were examined. Data was collected through interviews, observation and documentary analysis. The study was based on the views expressed by the college management, lecturers, and students who are the role players in the Public Further Education and Training (FET) Colleges in South Africa. Interviews were conducted to college management, lecturers and students of Centurion and Odi Campuses of Tshwane South College with the intention of determining if the students at this college were exposed to equal and quality opportunities for teaching and learning. Data from documents such as students results, staff establishment, budget, were analysed with the purpose of profiling the students and staff at Tshwane South College. Participant observation of physical facilities and usage of these facilities was done with the aim to verify the developments aimed at improving both campuses. The fundamental principles shaping the FET College Act of 2006 are quality education and equalisation of teaching and learning opportunities. The study shows that the implementation of the FET College Act of 2006 has been to a lesser degree a success in so far as number of factors is concerned. A case in point is that there is increasing evidence that the gap that existed when it comes to job opportunities has diminished leaving more blacks, particularly women in senior positions when it comes to management and administration of the FET Colleges in South Africa. Notwithstanding the elementary changes brought by the FET College Act, the fundamental principle that is central to education and training being the quality education and equalisation of learning and teaching opportunities is still a challenge 15 years later into the democratic rule in South Africa. There is evidence of poor infrastructure, shortage of basic learning materials and poor results due to poor quality of education and training. The overall findings of this study suggest that the FET College Act of 2006 has significantly contributed to delivery of inferior quality education and it has further widened a gap between the ‘have and the have not’s’. The study therefore recommends the government to review the current policy and it calls for students of public policy to persuade a study on the impact that the FET College Act of 2006 had on the education of the ‘African child’.

In this paper, we present evidence on the relationship between inequality and long-term development using data on different Brazilian regions. A new framework of analysis is provided in the sense that our empirical approach is developed within a constant de jure institutional environment - Brazil - accounting for possible differences in the de facto institutional environments (Brazilian regions) rooted in distinct colonial experiences within the same national territory. New inequality indicators are constructed from scratch for Brazilian municipalities in 1920 (using the Census of 1920, which, surprisingly, had thus far been ignored for such purposes). We find no significant relationship between economic (land) inequality (proxied by the Land Gini) and political concentration (proxied by the percentage of eligible voters) for Brazilian municipalities in the early twentieth century. And although our econometric analysis indicates a positive robust relationship between economic inequality and long-term development indicators for Southeastern states (São Paulo, the center of coffee production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a state with a large influx of European immigrants, which became the most dynamic Brazilian region; and Minas Gerais, the gold cycle region, shaped also by cattle-farming and coffee production), we find no relationship for Pernambuco, a state in the Northeast region representative of the old agrarian structure of colonial sugar plantations; and a positive and robust relationship for Rio Grande do Sul, a Southern state with a colonial experience more similar to that of the United States and Canada. We found no evidence of a robust relationship between the percentage of eligible voters and long-term development, a surprising result in light of the results provided in development literature, but likely consistent with a politically captured system with very low levels of enfranchisement. These results are shown to hold even when controlling for proxies for structural changes that happened in this time span, namely: urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Moreover, land inequality in 1920 is at most weakly related to contemporaneous income inequality for Minas Gerais and São Paulo, but significant for Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Sul. In other words, evidence suggests that the positive effects of inequality are associated to a particular structural organization at a specific time, in contrast to a more structural inequality, which, as exemplified by the cases of Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Sul, would have negative or no significant effects on long-term development. Finally, we find no robust relationship between the overall land Gini and long-term economic development. These results highlight the importance of the study of historical and social elements in their respective context, as the results are consistent with the picture of a rural Brazil dominated by agrarian elites within a complex institutional environment. / Este estudo apresenta novas evidências sobre a relação entre desigualdade e desenvolvimento de longo prazo a partir de dados de diferentes regiões brasileiras. A análise é realizada a partir de uma original estratégia de identificação: trabalhamos dentro de um ambiente institucional de jure constante - o Brasil - permitindo possíveis efeitos heterogêneos a partir de ambientes institucionais de facto (estados brasileiros) diferentes, resultantes de diferentes experiências coloniais. Novos indicadores de desigualdade são construídos a partir de dados primários para os municípios brasileiros em 1920 (usamos o Censo de 1920, que não foi sistematicamente utilizado para tais propósitos): o índice de Gini da distribuição de terras (entre donos de terras e considerando toda a população) e a porcentagem de potenciais eleitores. Primeiro, não encontramos uma relação significativa entre a desigualdade da distribuição de terras e a relativa concentração política para os municípios considerados no início do século XX. Segundo, e, de certo modo, surpreendente, encontramos, através de exercícios econométricos, relações entre desigualdade e desenvolvimento no longo-prazo particulares para cada conjunto de observações: (i) uma relação positiva entre desigualdade da distribuição de terras e desenvolvimento para os estados da região Sudeste, São Paulo (o centro da produção cafeeira nos séculos XIX e XX que recebeu um forte fluxo de imigrantes e que se tornou o estado brasileiro mais dinâmico) e Minas Gerais (estado particularmente influenciado pelo ciclo do ouro, moldado também pela atividade de criação e produção de café); (ii) uma ausência de relação significativa entre os indicadores de desigualdade no início do século XX e desenvolvimento contemporâneo para o estado de Pernambuco (estado da região Nordeste, representativo da antiga estrutura colonial de produção de açúcar); e (iii) uma relação negativa entre desigualdade e desenvolvimento para o Rio Grande do Sul (estado da região Sul, com colonização mais associada a países da América do Norte). Terceiro, não encontramos uma relação estatisticamente robusta entre nosso indicador de concentração política e desenvolvimento no longo-prazo. O que seria um resultado possivelmente contra-intuitivo à luz da literatura internacional, é provavelmente consistente com um sistema político capturado e níveis bastante baixos de acesso ao voto. Os resultados acima são mantidos mesmo após controlarmos para proxies de mudanças estruturais ocorridas no período, entre elas: urbanização, industrialização e imigração. Além desses resultados, apresentamos evidência de que a desigualdade da distribuição da terra em 1920 é, no máximo, fracamente relacionada à desigualdade contemporânea para Minas Gerais e São Paulo, enquanto é significante para o Rio Grande do Sul e Pernambuco. Em outras palavras, nossas evidências sugerem que os efeitos positivos da desigualdade no início do século estão associados a uma particular organização em um período histórico específico, em contraste com uma desigualdade mais estrutural, exemplificada pelos casos de Pernambuco e Rio Grande do Sul, no qual os efeitos da desigualdade são negativos ou insignificantes no desenvolvimento de longo prazo. Finalmente, não encontramos uma relação estatisticamente robusta entre o índice de Gini da distribuição de terras considerando toda a população e o desenvolvimento das regiões consideradas. Estes resultados ressaltam a importância do estudo de elementos históricos no seu respectivo contexto, uma vez que são consistentes com um Brasil rural dominado por elites agrárias em um complexo ambiente institucional.

Thesis advisor: Robert G. Murphy / This paper seeks to further establish the effects of fiscal decentralization on income inequality. While many major world organizations, such as the United Nations, and politicians are promoting the use of decentralization policies, their effects on income inequality remain largely unstudied. I add to the literature on fiscal decentralization in order to determine if it should be used as a policy tool designed to decrease income inequality. I empirically study the effects of fiscal decentralization by using a model largely based off of Akai and Sakata (2005). I quantify fiscal decentralization with two measures in order to conclude what form of fiscal decentralization, if any, should be used in order to decrease income inequality. My hope is that this paper contributes to the literature on fiscal decentralization, specifically in providing caution to politicians who haphazardly institute policies calling for increased fiscal decentralization. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Since the 1990s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has increasingly impacted minority groups in the United States, particularly African Americans. Why is this happening? Comparative studies of developing nations have convincingly established a relationship between concentrated poverty, ethnic boundaries, and lack of effective governmental response as contributing to high levels of infection in those countries. To date, however, no study has sought to apply these insights to the American context. This dissertation endeavors to show that, first, marginalization of U.S. sub-groups most at risk of infection is largely a product of poor health outcomes associated with concentrated urban poverty and economic stratification. Second, this sub-group marginalization is exacerbated by the politics of retrenchment which increasingly privatizes risks onto individuals, states, and non-governmental providers. The net result of these changes is a U.S. health care system too fractured to recognize and respond to changes in HIV/AIDS demographics.

The rst chapter uses a unique dataset on Brazilian party members and variation from mayoral elections to examine the determinants of party membership in Brazil. It starts by examining the effect of winning office on the membership of political parties at the local level. The effect of interest is identi ed using a differences-indifferences approach that compares changes in membership of parties that assume office with changes in membership of all other political parties registered in a municipality. The results indicate that winning office increases the membership of the party of the mayor by 0:5%. In addition, political alignment with higher levels of government has a signifi cant effect on the membership of the mayoral candidate party. Finally, the paper documents that party switching is one of the drivers of the estimated increase in membership. The paper offers evidence in favor of the hypothesis that party membership is driven by opportunistic motives in addition to ideology. The second chapter combines data on the universe of recipients of the Bolsa Famlia program from 2005 to 2015 with data on party membership to investigate the returns to political loyalty. Speci cally, it uses variation from mayoral elections to investigate whether members of political parties that assume office at the local level are more likely to receive social transfers. Regression results from an IV estimation show that indeed members of the party that gained access to municipal government are signifi cantly more likely to receive the benefi t. Additionally, it finds no evidence that members of parties that did not win office are more likely to lose the benefi t as a result of the electoral defeat. This chapter offers direct evidence of material rewards to party membership. The last chapter focuses on the impact of pay transparency on earnings inequality in the Brazilian public sector. Differences-in-differences estimates show that the disclosure of wages reduced the 90/50 decile wage gap across municipalities located in states that adopted wage transparency in comparison to those located in states that did not adopt the policy. There is also no evidence that earnings decile gaps below the median were affected by the salary transparency policy, which indicates that the effect of disclosure in the public sector was mainly concentrated at the upper tail of the log earnings distribution. Finally, evidence presented suggests that the effect on inequality compression is the result of lower returns to top paid occupations rather than changes in employment. The paper suggests that at the margin, top paid public sector employees are insensitive to changes in their earnings, indicating that there are rents that accrue to holding these positions.

This thesis analyzes if there, given the size of the informal sector, is an effect of corruption on income inequality, here defined as the Palma ratio. Estimations are done with a fixed effects ordinary least squares regression using panel data for 19 federal states of Brazil over every other year between 2006-2014. The results provide evidence that corruption increases income inequality when the informal sector is smaller than 37.97%, but decreases inequality when the informal sector exceeds 55.34%. The findings are robust to several sensitivity checks. The gained insight of the relationship between corruption and income inequalityusing a microeconomic perspective is the main academic contribution of this thesis.

This research investigated the relationships between potential constraints to students’ access to technological resources and student academic performance. Longitudinal data from 2010 (n=228), 2011 (n=340) and 2012 (n=347) from South African accounting students was used to test the relationships between technological resources access and student academic performance using correlation analysis, multiple linear regression analysis and factor analysis. Access to the latest software was found to be associated with student academic performance; a ‘digital divide’ between students may influence their academic performance. This research specifically identifies certain constraints potentially associated with a ‘digital divide’ that may influence student performance. / KIM2018

The worldwide gap between rich and poor is widening. Status seeking and status keeping are fueled by the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods. These bright shiny objects are staples in a restricted economy in which only the wealthy participate. The notion of gaining riches for the purpose of helping the poor is fading. Materialism, luxury and riches have been the subject of religious and secular inquiry. In this quest, wealth has been condemned and applauded. Prestige-obsessed consumers are becoming blind to worsening social conditions.

Advocates of self-managed teams, a common strategy for organizing work, suggest that teams may be a solution to gender inequality in the workplace. According to this argument, the nonteam-structured workplace is typically stratified by gender with women occupying the lower stratum of the hierarchy. Women's formal and informal interactions are therefore limited to mostly other women in similar low-status positions. This gendered pattern of interaction is said to negatively affect women's career opportunities and outcomes because women's positions prevent them from accessing and mobilizing good social capital - benefits from ties to influential persons within the organization. Self-managing teams that cross-cut workplace positions and subunits provide access to good social capital, thus enhancing women's work outcomes. I tested this argument with data from a case study of employees in the asset management subdivision of a multinational insurance and asset management company dubbed Finco Asset Management. In general, the results confirm the benefits of participation in self-managing teams. First, in Chapter 3 I found that workgroups, the nonteam structure at Finco, were more likely to be segregated by gender than self-managing project teams. In Chapter 4, I found that workplace position, workgroup and the perceived importance of another for one's career advancement determined the informal structure at Finco. Tie importance attenuated the effect of joint project team participation, which suggests that employees were strategic about forming ties with influential persons in project teams. In Chapter 5, I found that the informal structure, particularly indegree centrality and outdegree centrality, were key predictors of promotion and pay increase. Indegree centrality alone determined layoffs, however. Thus consistent with the social capital argument, self-managing project teams reduced gender segregation, provided access to important informal networks and the informal networks influenced employee work outcomes. However, gender mattered as well. Women were more likely to share workgroups and less likely to be in upper management. Women were also less likely to have same-sex informal networks within their subdivision after accounting for tie importance; however, they were more likely to have same-sex ties in other subdivisions. Women also reported lower job commitment and saw fewer opportunities for mobility at Finco in comparison to men. Hence, while participation in cross-cutting, self-managing teams does improve women's work outcomes, gender differences persist in positions and attitudes.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation research brings together disparate bodies of literature on environmental inequality, sociology of space, and feminist theories of intersectionality to bear on the location and distribution of environmental hazards in the form of landfills. Landfills pose a threat to both ecological sustainability as well as present risks to human health through contamination and pollution. While environmental inequality literatures have executed exceptional work into the dynamics of race and class with respect to the distribution of hazardous waste facilities, the literature is noticeably lacking with respect to identifying relationships between gender and environmental inequalities. Furthermore, many quantitative studies have exclusively focused on hazardous waste facilities as a singular measure of environmental inequality. This study advances the field in three major ways. First, through the inclusion of theorizations based on feminist intersectionality theories, this research empirically analyzes hypotheses derived from intersectionality theories to understand dynamics of gender-environment interactions. Second, this study extends analysis to all forms of waste containment—municipal, industrial, construction and demolition, and hazardous—to identify trends across the social fabric of the contiguous United States at the county level of analysis with respect to multiple forms of environmental hazards. Third, utilizing innovative analytic techniques, this research provides three unique and related strategies, geographic information systems, logistic binary regression, and structural equation modeling, to examine socio-environmental disparities. Findings from each analytic strategy inform the subsequent strategy. Findings suggest the importance of including gender indicators to account for the unique effect of gender and environmental inequality. Furthermore, results indicate the importance in applying intersectionality theories to environmental outcomes as well as empirically testing hypotheses derived from the largely theoretical and qualitatively backed field. Future research should focus on specific regional dynamics of identified socio-environmental interactions by including historical and qualitative data to triangulate quantitative findings. / 1 / Clare Cannon