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Climate change is one of the highest priority problems which needs to be addressed. The Paris Agreement focuses on zero-carbon solutions and to stop global warming while the United Nations highlights 17 sustainability goals. Climate action is one of those goals aiming to increase resilience to climate hazards and implement national policies and strategies towards climate change. Economic growth is also one of the United Nation’s sustainability goals and should not be compromised. This thesis is investigating how economic growth can be maintained while reducing carbon emissions. To reach this objective carbon emissions need to be decoupled from economic growth and this study analyses the key factors that drive decoupling and how the objective can be achieved. The study was performed over 14 countries during 2000 to 2019 within the EU, using secondary data from open sources. Tapio’s decoupling elasticity model was considered for the observed countries, and a quantitative analysis over carbon emissions, economic growth and several other variables was performed over the panel data using regression models. The shape of the environmental curve was alsoinvestigated using a regression model. The results showed that carbon emissions can be decoupled from economic growth where renewable energy, environmental patents and investments in research and development are key factors. Renewable energy is considered as a proxy for new technologies while environmental patents and investments in research and development, as proxies for innovation. Energyconsumption played a vital role since it decreased less than carbon emissions during those years, but at the same time economic growth could be increased. The quantitative analysis showed that renewable energy, energy intensity, environmental patents, foreign direct investments, and population growth aresignificant factors that can reduce carbon emissions. It is also shown that increases in gross domestic product (GDP) drives carbon emissions increases. The analysis provided indications for an N-shaped environmental curve. Investments in renewable energy, environmental patents and energy efficiency are principal factors to reach the climate goals of reducing carbon emissions without sacrificing economic growth. For future research, it would be interesting to see how individual sectors or clusters of countriesare affecting the results. Another suggestion is to study the pandemic period (2020-2021) and the effect of the latest energy crisis linked with the war in Ukraine to understand the impacts on carbon emissions and economic growth.

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Magister Commercii - MCom / The following research paper is based on employment intensity, arguing the notion that an increase in economic growth alone does not necessary increase the rate of employment in South Africa. In fact, other additional macroeconomic factors determine changes in the rate of employment, along with economic growth. This research measured the employment numbers in each South African sector with reference to sector-specific gross value added, to determine the level of elasticity of employment in each sector. This was done by extracting quarterly data in-between the year 1995 to 2019. For each sector, a unit root test was estimated, an ARDL bound test for cointegration, an error correction model. A stability and diagnostic test were conducted to test the fluidity of each regression model. The coefficient of each sector modelled indicated no correlation between employment and economic growth. In “all sectors”, the results of GVA were not influential enough to implement positive change in the levels of employment, thus, leading to jobless growth.

Magister Commercii - MCom / The connection between the real economy and the financial sector continues to be a subject of debate amongst scholars. There is a plethora of studies dedicated to unravelling the relationship between economic activity and financial progress. However, a large share of those studies has concentrated on banking and the capital market industries; the studies that have undertaken to decipher the connection between the insurance industry and prosperity in the economy are insufficient. An understanding of the connection between the insurance industry and advancement in the economy is immensely important to effect judicious policy making, which will enhance and boost the economy. The primary goal of this study is to establish if there is a connection between the insurance industry and economic advancement in the South African context.

This thesis aims to emancipate female entrepreneurs from the metanarrative of economic growth which has created a false dichotomy of successful male entrepreneur versus an unsuccessful female entrepreneur. This aim is pursued through a multidisciplinary and critical inquiry that destabilises this metanarrative conceptually and empirically. A critical interrogation of economic studies reveals the embeddedness of the metanarrative in neo-classical economic growth theory. Far from being a true reflection of the entrepreneurial experience, the theory has silenced the innovator entrepreneur in economic theory and replaced him/her with an economic rational manager. Concurrently, a re-analysis of Schumpeter’s theorising suggests that his theories do not subordinate female entrepreneurs as claimed by a number of critical theorists. In contrast, his theorising is emancipatory and offers an alternative theoretical framework to the oppressive neo-classical economic growth theory. Oral history methods are used to capture the voices of female entrepreneurs which have largely been excluded from the literature. The oral history narratives challenge the oppressive homogeneity imposed by the metanarrative of economic growth and illustrate the negative influence of the theoretical foundation of neo-classical theory upon the entrepreneurial experience. The study offers theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to female entrepreneurship studies by presenting a fresh interpretation of Schumpeter’s theorising; including the voices of the female entrepreneurs; and applying research approaches that break away from positivism which dominates entrepreneurial studies. The study has implications for policy makers and practitioners as it generates knowledge that takes account of the current social and economic changes. / Bradford University School of Management

This dissertation examines the aggregate and sectoral implications of the self-selection of workers with different skills into sectors and occupations. The first chapter concerns the low growth rate of labor productivity in services in the United States that accompanied the large expansion of the sector. The slow growth of labor productivity in this sector may be caused by the selection of less productive workers into services as the sector expands. Using panel data for US workers, I document that workers moving into professional services are more productive than an average worker in the sector. On the other hand, workers moving into education, health, and the public sector are less productive than incumbents. I build a generalized quantitative multi-sector Roy model that allows for these rich patterns of selection. Compared to a conventional selection model where new workers arriving at all services sectors are negatively selected by assumption, the estimated model in this paper leads to an effect of selection on labor productivity for professional services that is 14 percentage points higher, and a weaker negative effect for education, health, and public services in the U.S. between 1989 and 2019. Overall, selection leads to little effect on labor productivity in aggregate services, contrasting sharply with the prediction of a conventional selection model. The second chapter, joint with Siddharth George, studies the potential gains in aggregate productivity from mitigating the intergenerational persistence in occupations. Workers are much more likely to enter the occupation of their parents around the world. In this chapter, we develop a measure of this dynastic bias for occupations – the odds ratio of the probability of choosing an occupation conditional on whether one’s father is in that occupation – for over 90 countries with data from 275 censuses or national surveys. At the occupation level, we document that the dynastic bias is increasing in the eliteness of occupation but decreasing in the average years of schooling. At the aggregate level, we document that the dynastic bias first rises and then falls with both GDP per capita and the average years of schooling of an economy. To evaluate the aggregate implication of the dynastic bias on productivity, we build a quantitative Roy model of occupational choice with entry barriers into occupations that depend on whether one’s parent works in that occupation or not. We calibrate the model and perform counterfactual exercises to infer the potential gains in productivity for all economies in our sample. The entry barriers of occupations are set to match the dynastic bias of each occupation. We then remove all entry barriers and solve for the new equilibrium so that workers pursue their occupations entirely based on their comparative advantage without any income penalty. This frictionless counterfactual leads to labor productivity gains at the aggregate level that average at 8.6% for all censuses in our sample. Focusing on the latest censuses of the 51 non-high-income countries with data after 2000, we find that the average potential gains in labor productivity remain considerable at 8.7%, with 20 countries having potential gains above 10%.

This thesis comprises three empirical studies. The first study assesses the multidimensional concept of financial inclusion with an objective to segregate the key determinants, from a range of potential influencing factors. Using a large cross-country sample of developing countries, over a 14-year period from 2004 to 2017, findings suggest that physical access to banking services, advances in financial technology, government effectiveness and rural population are significantly associated with financial inclusion and should be the principal focus of policy initiatives. Sub-sample analysis shows considerable differences in the key determining factors of financial inclusion across six regions and three income groups. The second study empirically investigates the complex relationship between financial inclusion and financial stability for the period and sample considered in the first study, by employing Instrumental Variables Two Stage Least Squares (IV 2SLS) estimation and Difference-in-Differences (DID) methods. Results show that financial inclusion has a significant positive impact on financial stability. Also, countries that actively implement policies to promote financial inclusion experience an enhanced positive impact on stability, as compared to other countries. The third study constructs a Financial Inclusion Index (FII) for 23 Indian states over a 44-year period and then uses the composite measure to examine the impact of financial inclusion on economic growth. Unconditional Quantile Regression (UQR) estimates reveal a positive impact of inclusion on growth, with richer states in the west and the south benefitting more in terms of higher income caused by a higher level of financial inclusion than the poorer states in the north and the east, thus widening the income gap. While, liberalisation augments the financial inclusion induced income inequality, the proportion of the rural population reduces it. / Scholarship from the Faculty of Management, Law and Social Sciences

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