Student Number : 0506739P - MA research report - School of Social Sciences - Faculty of Humanities / In this study, the positive correlation between social capital and economic performance as well as between social capital and political engagement, documented in the vibrant social capital literature, is revisited with focus on the experience of Congolese immigrants in Central Johannesburg. The core research question aims at establishing whether Congolese immigrants with higher stock of social capital turn out to be better economic performers and more politically engaged agents. The investigation has used both quantitative and qualitative methods. The major data collection instrument has been a survey questionnaire that has reached a relatively representative sample of 100 Congolese immigrants living in Yeoville, Berea, Hillbrow, Parktown, and Braamfontein. Informal interviews, direct observation, and previous literature has provided more qualitative information that has helped to account for statistical trends. While the Congolese immigrant community displays vibrant associational life and intensive social interactions, the predominance of religious associations, the scarcity of socio-economic organisations and the prevalence of bonding ties affect Congolese immigrants’ ability to benefit from their general high capacity to interact with others. The study has also found that voluntary associations may just have symbolic value as they do not represent support structures on which members rely to handle their daily challenges. Instead, family members and fellow Congolese friends constitute the most important social support. As for the correlation between social capital and economic performance, the model has been found valid but its explanatory power weak. Social capital can only partly account for Congolese immigrants’ economic performance. Its impact on their level of political engagement is equally weak. Social capital’s weak influence on Congolese level of political engagement has to do with the apolitical tendency of most religious associations, individuals’ lack of English proficiency, and poverty. South Africa institutional constraints to immigrants’ socio-economic integration, disempowering features of Congolese associations, individuals’ marginal position within networks and the general absence of resources have also been singled out as major justification of Congolese immigrants’ social capital powerlessness. This study contributes to the existing social capital debate at least in three respects. Firstly, it shows that measuring individuals’ social capital on the basis of associational life can be misleading. In some communities, voluntary associations may not be the most important source of social capital. Secondly, Congolese immigrants’ social capital powerlessness illustrates that social capital productivity is function not only of social interactions but also of broad institutional context. Thirdly, political engagement does not just follow from associations’ attendance. An apolitical association such as Jehovah witness church or an association attended mainly by undereducated people may still build organisational skills, but insulate participants from the political community.

Gross Domestic Product has historically been the dominant, often sole, yardstick regarding a nation's economic development, growth, and well-being. This paper acknowledges GDP's shortcomings and aims development more rounded metrics to better measure well-being. The aim of this thesis is to advance the work done by 2009 Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress by reassessing the twelve recommendations made by Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi and attempting to apply them to a new dashboard of metrics. JEL Classification I31 E01 E21 Keywords well-being, economic performance, GDP, Stiglitz Commission, quality-of-life, social progress Abstrakt Hrubý domácí produkt je historicky dominantní metrika v souvislosti s národním hospodářským rozvojem, růstem a blahobytem. Tato práce potvrzuje nedostatky HDP a jejím cílem je vývoj více vyvážené metriky k lepšímu měření blahobytu. Zaměřuje se na prohloubení práce Stiglitze, Sena a Fitoussiho z roku 2009 (Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress), přehodnocuje jejich dvanáct doporučení a pokouší se je aplikovat na kolekci možných měření společenského rozvoje.

Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli / The fundamental concept unifying this thesis is that outcomes at small geographical units can shed light on key economic questions of interest for both macroeconomics and finance. Some of the questions I explore in my work include whether bank networks facilitate access to financial capital by small businesses in the US, whether lending to small businesses is important for short-term economic growth, and whether different cultural and institutional endowments improve economic outcomes in the long run.\\ Small Business Lending and the Bank-Branch Network: In this chapter, I examine the role of banks in propagating local economic shocks from one area to another through their network of bank branches, by exploiting a newly developed branch-level dataset. Specifically, I examine the change in the geographical distribution of small business loans within each bank network in response to: 1) increases in deposit growth due to presence in areas with new fracking wells; 2) changes in the profitability of real estate loans due to presence in areas experiencing real estate booms. I evaluate how the supply-driven changes in lending following these shocks impact real economic activity. I find that banks export the increase in liquidity from the fracking areas and fund more small business loans at other, more distant branches. Borrowers from banks with a higher exposure to fracking experience faster establishment growth at areas beyond 100 miles from the fracking activity. The results for the real estate booms show that increases in the return of real estate loans contributed to a decrease in small business lending at branches away these booms. Borrowers from banks with high exposure to residential appreciation experienced slower establishment growth even within areas at a significant distance from the real estate booms.\\ Does It Matter Where You Came From? Ancestry Composition and Economic Performance of US Counties, 1850 - 2010: The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-samples to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry composition of the population of US counties from 1850 to 2010. We also develop a county-level measure of GDP per capita over the same period. Using this novel panel data set, we show that the evolution of the country-of-origin composition of a county is significantly associated with changes in county-level GDP. The cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments from the country of origin drive this association. Particularly important are attitudes towards cooperation with others. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we identify a significant effect of changes in the ancestry-weighted endowments on economic development. Finally, our results suggest that while the fractionalization of ancestry groups is positively related to county GDP, fractionalization in attributes such as trust is negatively related to local economic performance. \\ Culture: Persistence and Evolution: This paper presents evidence on the speed of evolution (or lack thereof) of a wide range of values and beliefs of different generations of European immigrants to the US and interprets the evidence in the light of a simple model of socialization and identity choice. The main result is that persistence differs greatly across cultural attitudes. For instance, many family values, political orientation, and most deep personal religious values converge slowly to the prevailing US norm. Others, such as attitudes toward cooperation, children's independence, and sexual matters, converge rather quickly. The results obtained studying higher generation immigrants differ greatly from those found when the analysis is limited to the second generation, as typically done in the literature, and they imply a lesser degree of persistence than previously thought. Finally, we show that persistence is ``culture specific'' in the sense that the country from which one's ancestors came matters for the pattern of generational convergence. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The Master Thesis deals with the topic of the programme of support Prosperity, which is a part of Enterpreneurship and Innovation Programme during period 2007-2013. The main objective of the programme Prosperity is to facilitate the access to finance for the start-ups and further development of the infrastastructure for industrial research, technological development and innovation. Further analysis is focused on finding if there exists any dependency between regional economic performance and amount of received financial support from the programme Prosperity. Achieved regional economic performance will be evaluated based on selected indicators.

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The purpose of this paper is to build a comprehensive indicator of Information Communication Technology (ICT). We first develop an ICT indicator for Taiwan high-technology industries. We then extend the Bresnahan, Brynjolffson and Hitt (2000) model to measure the impact of ICTs on economic performance and organization structure. In this paper, a new measure of ICTs provides a more complete picture of ICT activity in Taiwan high-technology industry.

Effects of globalization transform the forms of relations between settlements and it also changed the relations between capital and labor. In this global era performances of individual settlements became crucial in the absence of old hierarchic boundaries. But individual performances of settlements are not enough to integrate the global system. A New type of spatial organization appeared which is called networking to enhance complementary and cooperative relations crucial for synergy. The spatial reflexions of this transformation process are city regions. This study aims to determine the factors affecting economic performance and networking patterns of settlements in Antalya Region with the use of quantitative research methods.

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Purpose - The purpose of this study is to examine and map out the network innovative companies and to calculate values of the network structure in order to compare them to different performance measures. Furthermore, we aim to investigate the trade-off efficiency of innovations in a particular network structure, more specifically to investigate if the same elements generating more innovations have a relationship with economic performance that originates from innovations.   Methodology - This study give emphasis to map and illustrate the Swedish companies on NASDAQ OMX First North network through direct and indirect connection and to compare the centrality, density and size of the companies ego network in our population with the performance measures which are logically connected with the launch of an innovation; average EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) and average annual turnover. Findings - First we noticed that there was a significant connection between a negative average EBITDA and positive average annual turnover for our population, as we foretold would occur during the launch of an innovation. Secondly, the paper suggests that there is a weak or near non-existent connection between the elements that generates more innovations and the result of innovations, e.g. the economic performance of innovative firms. This might indicate that the focus of recent studies in the subject might have been mistaken focusing on the quantity of innovation, when the basic assumption of an innovation is that it is qualitative and thereby generates money for the company. This study suggests that more innovations do not necessarily lead to better economic performance for the companies within our population.

Economic performance assessment (EPA) of control systems is receiving increasing attention in both academia and industry. It addresses the estimation of the potential benefits resulting from control upgrade projects and monitoring and improvement of economic performance of the control system. Economic performance of control systems can often be related to crucial controlled variables dynamically and when controlled variables move away from an optimal operating point either more profit will be made or more cost will be incurred. This relation can be modelled by performance functions (PFs). When the multivariate nature of a process’s economic model is not considered, PFs of different controlled variables are referred to as individual performance functions. Otherwise, PFs of dependent controlled variables are referred to as joint performance functions. PFs play an important role in the latest techniques of EPA. There appears, however, to be no systematic method for developing PFs. The lack of such a method restrains further research into EPA, as without well-established PFs an EPA cannot be conducted smoothly and therefore cannot effectively support decision-making for management. The development of PFs is a bottleneck in the further research into EPA. Furthermore, the multivariate nature of processes has not been taken into account sufficiently as far as the relevant literature is concerned, which hampers the accuracy of PFs and accordingly the accuracy of economic assessment results. The contributions of this thesis lie in the following aspects: • A methodology for developing PFs is proposed, based on the PF development for an electric arc furnace, a grinding mill circuit and a stage of a bleach plant. • A comprehensive case study of an EPA of three controllers of a grinding mill circuit is conducted using a newly published framework to show the significance of PFs and how to perform an EPA systematically. • The current practice and guidelines on the control and functional/economic performance assessment of grinding mill circuits are captured using a survey study. The multivariate nature of an electric arc furnace’s economic model is investigated and joint performance functions are built based on individual performance functions. A multivariate economic assessment is conducted that shows how joint performance functions can help to provide a more accurate estimate of the economic performance of a controlled process. A web-based survey study on grinding mill circuits in mineral processing industries is conducted. One of its objectives is to obtain general PFs of grinding circuits. The survey results provide instructive insight into the PFs of grinding circuits. Furthermore, an in-depth literature review is conducted and the relationship between the product’s particle size distribution of grinding mill circuits and mineral recovery in downstream flotation circuits is revealed. The PFs of a grinding mill circuit being considered are formed, based on the survey results and literature study. An investigation into the PF development of a stage of a bleach plant is performed and crucial ideas used for their development are abstracted. A methodology for developing PFs for the EPA of control systems is then proposed by synthesising the methods used in the PF development described above. This methodology mainly includes the following stages: Stage 1: Determine information required for PF development. • Process operation and control understanding. • Process economics understanding. Stage 2: Gain required information on PF development. • PF-related information elicitation using survey research. • PF-related information available in the literature, including textbooks, journal papers, conference papers. • PF-related information from plant tests. Stage 3: Obtain suitable performance measures. Stage 4: Make suitable assumptions. Stage 5: Determine PFs. Stage 6: Develop Joint PFs. An economic assessment of three controllers (a nonlinear model predictive controller, a decentralized controller and three single-loop proportional-integral-derivative controllers) of the considered grinding mill circuit is conducted, using an EPA framework published recently to show the central role of PFs in the EPA and how to perform an EPA systematically. The circuit’s PFs, developed as described above, are used for the assessment. The EPA also shows that the improvement in the economic performance with the nonlinear model predictive controller mainly results from the improvement of the operating point and the controlled variables’ variation reduction only contributes a small part to the overall improvement, due to the characteristic of the PF of the circuit’s product particle size distribution. In addition, a web-based survey study is conducted and the current practice and guidelines on the control and functional/economic performance assessment of grinding mill circuits are captured. The questionnaire used for the study includes five segments. The first part identifies the respondents and the second part is intended to obtain background information on the milling circuits. The third part concerns the choice of key process variables and their economic impact. Part four involves the control of milling circuits and control loop performance and part five covers economic issues. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / unrestricted