O objetivo do presente trabalho é analisar empiricamente a relação entre indicadores de qualidade da educação e o crescimento econômico no Brasil, com ênfase em medidas de qualidade da educação, representadas pelos resultados de provas em proficiência escolar ao nível dos estados brasileiros. A análise empírica, seguindo os conceitos de Hanushek e Kimko (2000) sobre a qualidade da educação, utilizou como referência metodológica dois modelos macroeconômicos tradicionais da análise do crescimento com capital humano: (i) o modelo de crescimento baseado na equação de Mincer; (ii) modelo de Solow estendido sugerido por Mankiw, Romer e Weil (1992). Utilizando a metodologia de dados em painel, os resultados sugerem que a quantidade de capital humano teve uma contribuição maior para o crescimento do produto por trabalhador do que a qualidade da força de trabalho. Alguns fatores que podem explicar a baixa contribuição da qualidade do capital humano para o crescimento são: o curto período de análise, a dificuldade em se obter medidas mais precisas de qualidade do capital humano, e na média, a qualidade do capital humano no país é comparativamente baixa (em relação a outros países), como resultado das muitas e reconhecidas deficiências do sistema educacional brasileiro. / This research aims analyze empirically the relationship between indicators of education quality and economic growth in Brazil, emphasizing the measures of education quality represented by the results on school proficiency tests at the Brazilians states level. The empirical analysis, following the concepts of Hanushek e Kimko (2000) about quality education, was based on two traditional macroeconomic growth models with human capital: (i) the growth model based on the Mincer equation, (ii) extended Solow model suggested by Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992). Using the panel data methodology, the results suggest the quantity of human capital had a greater contribution to the output per worker growth than the labor force quality. Some factors that may explain the low contribution of human capital quality to growth is the short period of analysis, the difficulty to define quality measures of human capital, and, on average, the quality of human capital in the country which is relatively low (compared with other countries), as a result of the many and recognized deficiencies of the Brazilian educational system.

Thesis (M. Dev.) -- University of Limpopo, 2016 / Socio-economic changes in the City of Polokwane have compelled many unemployed people to start street trading. Street trading is fraught with many challenges, such as lack of transportation, physical infrastructure, and access for funding, change of local municipality by-laws, lack of support and other related economic development issues. This study is concerned with the factors that hamper the development of street trading, economic growth and development in the City of Polokwane. The study tried to develop effective strategies that will enhance the capacity of street traders and change the perception of stakeholders to support street trading. In this study, a mixed research design was used to investigate the impact of street trading towards economic development in the area of the study. This study also used context-focus of the City of Polokwane as its springboard in engaging in this sometime daunting subject. Surely, with all the changes in the current socio- economic development, there is a need to review the impact of street trading towards economic development in the City of Polokwane. As stipulated in the study, the City of Polokwane should invest in training to enhance street traders` effectiveness so as to have an impact on the economic development in the city. To accelerate this process, the stakeholders should be encouraged to support street traders so as to improve the status of economic growth in the area.

Freedom is universally valued and fundamentally affects social life. In this thesis, I examine how freedom affects an important dimension of business: long-term commitment (LTC). The LTC of corporations is vital for economic growth because economic development is reliant on entrepreneurs continuously investing in physical and social capital. Corporate opportunism will never lead to long-term economic growth. Specifically, this study examines the effects of political freedom (PF) and economic freedom (EF) on two LTC-related variables: investment and the commitment to maintaining a loyal shareholder base, both of which are essential topics in the business literature. This study consists of two essays. The first essay investigates the effects of a country's political versus economic freedom on corporate investment based on a sample of 19,605 companies operating in 49 countries for the timespan covering 1995 to 2015. First-differencing (FD) regressions show that PF and EF are positively associated with corporate investment, but PF's effect is larger. I also find that the effect of EF is conditional on the development of PF but not vice versa. Further, the effect of PF does not seem to be due to concurrent changes in uncontrolled factors: major changes in PF have larger effects than minor changes, and I do not observe a reversion in the effect of PF. Lastly, I find that an improvement in PF is associated with a larger growth in investment among firms with state ownership or political connections, suggesting a larger distorting effect of low PF on these firms' investment decisions. Overall, the findings shed new light on the economic reforms designed by policymakers: economic reforms, no matter how easy they seem, may not work well without political reforms. The second essay examines the impacts of a country's political compared with economic freedom on corporations' commitment to maintaining a loyal shareholder base. With a sample of 45 countries spanning 12 years, the FD result shows that PF and EF are positively associated with corporations' commitment to shareholder loyalty (CSL). More importantly, PF has a greater effect than EF. It is also determined that the impact of EF is dependent on the advancement of PF, but the reverse is not true. Furthermore, the impact of PF is not caused by concurrent changes in uncontrolled factors: major changes in PF are more impactful than minor changes, while a reversion in the impact of PF is not observed. Finally, I find that an enhancement to PF is correlated with a more significant increase in CSL among firms with state ownership or political connections than in firms without. This implies that low PF has a greater distorting effect on the CSL of such firms. In general, these results indicate that while it is comparatively easier for policymakers to enact economic reforms, their effectiveness may be reduced in the absence of concurrent political reforms.

This thesis aims at studying the issues of economic structure and resource allocation in development. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to economic development and gives an overview of this thesis. Chapter 2 reviews some theories and models about economic structure and structural change and points out that resource allocation is a critical factor in changing the economic structure. Five characteristics of economic structure and structural change are summarized. Essay 1 in Chapter 3 investigates the relationship between competitiveness and economic growth. Adopting the Global Competitiveness Index to represent competitiveness, we empirically show that there is a two-way causal relationship between competitiveness and economic growth. We further identify that the relationship between competitiveness and economic growth change in different development stages. Specifically, better competitiveness can enhance economic growth but not vice versa in developing countries. We therefore relate such a difference to the ability to transform resources into competitiveness. This is fundamentally a question about resource allocation. Finally, we link structural change with economic growth and show that enhancing competitiveness is equivalent to improving the capacity to change the economic structure. Essay 2 in Chapter 4 studies the impacts of sub-optimal resource allocation on economic growth by applying a new model to the case of the effectiveness of official development assistance (ODA). This new model analyzes economic growth through structural change by the difference between the observed and optimal levels of competitiveness. Regarding the positive and negative impacts of foreign aid on the receiving country in the literature, we show that the net impact of ODA depends on the value of bias caused by inefficient allocation of resources and the adoption of a biased value system. As a result, both positive and negative views of ODA in the literature are somewhat correct. In principle, ODA does work in the sense of helping needy countries providing they can allocate such additional resources efficiently. The cruel truth is that most receivers of ODA are unable to transform these resources to productive uses and even lower their economic growth. The development aid country donors or global institutions may therefore have to review their existing policy for granting aid.Essay 3 in Chapter 5 introduces a new framework to study two important structural issues in China: regional fragmentation and ownership distortion. We extend the output-oriented structural efficiency measure to include subgroups to evaluate potential gains of improving resource allocation within and among subgroups. The new framework is then applied to China's industrial sector. Applying our new method for policymaking, the empirical results advocate prioritizing ownership reform over regional reform in China. Specifically, by improving resource allocation among different ownerships, outputs of the whole industrial sector can be increased by 21% of the observed level. In contrast, the potential gains of reallocating resources between western and non-western regions are less than 1%. Such a conclusion cannot be drawn from other existing models of efficiency analysis. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the whole thesis.

Almost 30 years has passed since the concept of EMR first appeared. It is well acknowledged that globalization has been one of the major driving forces in the less-developed countries (LDCs) including China. The 2008 Global "Financial Tsunami" has recently ushered in a new economic dynamic in China, i.e. it has forced the Chinese government to take domestic demand as an important national development strategy and this will change its global economic relations as well as lead to changes in its domestic spatial dynamics. In that regard, new EMRs in Inland China, e.g. the Changzhutan (CZT) EMR in Hunan province, the Wuhan EMR in Hubei province, and the Zhongyuan EMR in Henan province, have been designated by the central government to support the domestic demand. Apart from the Coastal EMRs, i.e. the Pearl River Delta (PRD) EMR, this new phenomenon has also extended EMRs to Inland China. Would EMRs formed in Inland China share the same characteristics, mechanisms and spatial structure as those in the coastal areas? How will the new global economy, the demand for development of a low carbon economy and the domestic market impact on the growth of the interior EMRs in China? What can we learn from this new EMR experience in China, theoretically and practically for future policies and planning? Using provincial demographic data by municipality and county in 1990-2010 and supplemented by field surveys, we have tested our hypotheses after a literature review on the development of urban regions in the LDCs. Using the CZT as a case, temporal analyses based on municipal level demographic, economic and land-use data have been conducted to verify the hypothetical driving forces. Through the method of Fixed-effects (FE) model, it brings understanding on a possible new urbanization trend in China, which would likely be embedded in local forces against the nation's new development strategy of emphasizing domestic demand in the ii context of the country's transition towards a major global economy. Through the GIS mapping based county-level data of the CZT, spatial analyses are then conducted to examine the spatial structure of these EMRs in Inland China that are hypothesized as driven by the combination of domestic and global forces. The results have revealed that interior EMRs show a similar pattern to traditional Coastal EMRs in spatial pattern development, i.e. the co-existence of regional concentration of growth dynamics with the intra-EMR dispersion tendency of economic activities from its core to its peripheral "rural areas", although the nature of these forces might be different. For instance, its industrial activities that play a significant role in region-based concentration have shown a tendency toward "low-carbon" in line with the EMRs designation as the Experimental Zone of the "Two-oriented" (resource conserving and environmental-friendly)1 Society. Institutional perspectives have also been used to test the planning and management formation mechanisms of the EMR. It is found that the government role has been very significant and proactive in the formation of this region. Finally, a delimitation method is introduced to delimit the CZT into three rings to further demonstrate the spatial characteristics of region-based urbanization and its dynamics from domestic and global forces regulated by the government.

Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / The Quarterly Labour Force survey by Statistics South Africa (2019) portrays a very bleak future for the South African economy and labour force. The unemployment rate is 27.6% and youth unemployment stands at 55.2%. The National Development Plan (NDP) recognises the relevance of the informal sector and the value that it will contribute to the economy and to solving the challenges of unemployment in South Africa. The NDP projects that the informal sector, which includes domestic work, will create between 1,2 and 2 million new jobs by 2030. Few studies have been conducted on informal trading projects. This study explores the case of a ‗transitional‘ informal enterprise support project aimed at micro-enterprise development wherein 10 informal traders in Cape Town took occupancy of provincial government-sponsored kiosks on 9 May 2016. The Long Street kiosks (LSK) offer 10 traders per year a unique trading opportunity in the CBD free of rent and service charges for a period of one year, with access to a unique and potentially large market. The purpose of this study is to critically examine the role played in the informal enterprise development project by the Western Cape provincial government through its project manager, the Department of Economic Development and Tourism (DEDAT). This research attempts to investigate aspects of project design such as the selection criteria of the informal traders for the project, and selected results such as whether the project provided the traders with enough market exposure to the formal economy and whether their businesses were improved by participation in the project. The qualitative research approach was used for this study of the LSK project, which was a single case study, as both a unit of analysis and as a research method. The study involved a combination of two approaches, namely desktop research followed by interviews and focus group sessions. The study found that a number of limitations and shortcomings in the conduct of the project impacted on the mixed results and success achieved, pertaining to selection criteria, lack of financial and other resources, training, market-related problems, skill set limitations as well as environmental factors such as transport. The study nevertheless cast useful light on potential changes and recommendations that could enhance the project going forward and provides new insights on the complex relationship between the informal and formal ii economies and their relative potential for addressing the challenges of employment and economic growth.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / Small enterprises (SMME) have become central to South Africa's efforts to create jobs, alleviate poverty and develop the economy. SMMEs, however, face a wide range of problems, with "market access" one of the key bottlenecks. This centres (i.a.) around the ease of access to outsourcing markets of larger corporations and public-sector procurement opportunities. To address some of these specific challenges in the Western Cape, the Business Opportunity Network (Bon) was established in 1995 as an NOO. It was at that stage a path-breaking institution in the Western Cape, paralleled by only a few in the rest of the country. It is the purpose of this minithesis to assess the role, operation and evolution of the Bon. This study examines the background and particular factors that lead to the establishment of the Bon as a business-linkage organisation. Then critically assess the actual process of how the Bon attempted to facilitate SMME access to corporate and public-sector procurement in the Western Cape's metropolitan and platteland areas from 1994 to 2004. Thereafter moving toward the evaluation of the process, an assessment of the effectiveness of Bon's business-linkage efforts in the light of a continuously changing and evolving procurement environment. It is also the intention to reveal and assess how Bon's procurement support relates to BEE efforts unfolding in the Western Cape

Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / Local economic development approaches are increasingly being adopted in Africa to address spatial and territorial inequalities in development. Local economic development prioritises grassroots, bottom-up, regional people-centred approaches, and local partnerships to make communities self-reliant. Amidst this approach, the local government sector is encouraged to facilitate this local development process as outlined as the tier of government that supports participatory democracy. As such, most post-independence African countries embarked on a decentralisation drive to position the local government system to play a key role in local communities' development process. This study focused on understanding the part of the local government sector in enabling local economic development. This dissertation sought to investigate how local governments in Zimbabwe can play a role in supporting the process for achieving a local developmental state. The analysis focuses on the local economic development initiatives implemented by the Bulawayo City Council, with specific attention given to the diversification of their economy through the small and medium business enterprises. The theoretical framework of the study was based on the endogenous development approach. This approach is relevant to local economic development and the role of local government in creating local institutions of the process as it emphasises the local determination of choices, control over the planning process, and the local retention of the benefits within the locale. For the field research, a case study of the Bulawayo City Council was necessary to understand and have insights into economic development, local government structures and process in the Bulawayo Metropolitan Area.

This thesis reviews relationships between economic growth and water pollution in South Korea using the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Both national perspective (pooled data) and regional perspective (each river) are used to reveal the EKC theory. Given that the small sample covers four rivers and the period of 1985-2009, Fixed-effects model with a robust standard error is chosen for removing econometric problems. Empirical results demonstrate that the EKC theory explains water quality change in South Korea, depending on the types of water pollutants and their generated regional characteristics. The Han River does not show inverted-U shapes for BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) and COD (Chemical Oxygen Demand), but the Geum River (BOD), the Yeongsan River (BOD and COD), and the Nackdong River (COD) show inverted-U shapes. At the national perspective, BOD and COD might show inverted-U shapes; therefore, the EKC relationship cannot always be generalized between economic growth and environmental pollution.

MPM / Oliver Tambo Institute of Governance and Policy Studies / See the attached abstract below