This study outlines the importance of entrepreneurship in developing and growing the economy. South Africa is low in entrepreneurial activity when compared to other developing countries. Considering South Africa‘s high poverty and unemployment rates, retrenchments, downsizing of big businesses, high failure rate among start-ups, and the valuable contribution that effective entrepreneurship can make towards economic growth and development. It becomes very important to determine how entrepreneurship can be encouraged and promoted to yield the desired results. The key lever to increasing the pool of entrepreneurs is through education. The answer that is evident is that entrepreneurship education should be taught in schools. The South African curriculum has made provision for the teaching of entrepreneurship from an early age. There is a widespread idea that entrepreneurship education would generate more and better entrepreneurs than there have been in the past and that education would increase the chances of obtaining entrepreneurial success. To achieve this, the study attempted to find out about the status of the Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) teachers, whether they have the necessary knowledge and skills to produce learners with an entrepreneurial inclination or not. Again the study attempted to find out whether teachers would like to be trained or not. The results revealed that teachers do not have the necessary knowledge and skills to implement the EMS Learning Area and need to be trained. The study addresses the importance of training teachers in EMS and the principles of entrepreneurship. The goal is to provide teachers with the rationale, mindset, tools, skills and knowledge needed to infuse the spirit of entrepreneurship into classrooms and to expand entrepreneurial career options. Knowledgeable teachers are needed to bridge the gap between the content on paper and the actual transference of the entrepreneurial skills and attitude to the learner in order to raise South Africa’s rate of entrepreneurial activity. Education and training should be improved so that the supply of people equipped to become entrepreneurs is increased. / Dissertation (MPhil (Entrepreneurship))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Business Management / unrestricted

After successfully overthrowing Hosni Mubarak and his government in 2011, protestors rejoiced in long-repressed nationalist fervor, hopeful for the bright future that was sure to follow. Today, three years since the triumph, political inclusion and greater economic opportunity have not arrived. Throughout this transition process, the Egyptian economy has soured, and Egyptians have begun to feel nostalgia for the days of Mubarak’s regime when political stability, albeit repressive, had at least been accompanied by economic stability. This paper seeks to discover the root causes of poor economic performance in Egypt’s recent history, examine historical cases in which governments successfully overcame similar economic hardships, and propose feasible institutional reforms and recommendations to revive Egypt’s domestic economy in light of the country’s current political landscape.

Within the context of multiple crises and change, a range of practices discussed under the umbrella term of collaborative (or sharing) economy have been gaining considerable attention. Supporters build an idealistic vision of collaborative societies. Critics have been stripping the concept of its visionary potential, questioning its revolutionary nature. In the study, these debates are brought down to the local level in search for common perceptions among the co-creators of the concept in Vienna, Austria. Towards this aim a Q study is conducted, i.e. a mixed method enabling analyses of subjective perceptions on socially contested topics. Four voices are identified: True Believers, Market Optimists, Dedicated Critics, and Healthy Sceptics, each bringing their values, visions, and practical goals characteristic of different understanding of the collaborative economy. The study questions the need for building a globally-applicable definition of the concept, calls for more context-sensitivity, and the need for further exploratory approaches. (author's abstract) / Series: Ecological Economic Papers

The main objective of this study is to establish why NEPA has persistently failed to effectively turnaround with a view to recommending an effective corporate turnaround strategy. The corporation has performed very poorly for several decades in both monetary returns and service quality. Several attempts to reverse the situation have failed, thus frustrating the government who own the corporation and the consumers who use its services. To do this we start by building a theoretical framework to learn from experience of other organisations and establish the parameters for performance measurement, necessary for a successful corporate turnaround. Corporate turnaround strategy is only necessary if there is corporate decline. Corporate decline, however, does not occur as one of those things in an organisation but starts in one area and systematically spreads to the other areas. There are two sources of corporate decline, one internal to the company and the other external to it. While the managers may influence the internal causal factors of decline, it is not easy for them to influence the external causal factors of decline. However, good managers may minimise the effects of external factors of decline on their organisation. The main internal cause of corporate decline is management, along with other variables such as finance, organisation structure, bureaucracy and poor management decisions. Most corporate decline situations arise as a result of poor and inefficient management among others which include ineffective financial policy and control, overexpansion and large scale investments without proper costing. Yet. other factors include building.... of high cost structure in an organisation, poor marketing efforts and wrongly judged acquisitions and mergers. NEPA possesses most of these attributes of decline during the period of 1970 to 1992. The key symptoms of declining organisations are grouped in seven basic families of problems which are mainly liquidity, poor debt collection, declining profitability, quality failures, low employee morale and poor organisation structure. To reverse these trends. most turnaround strategies start with change of top management. The new management carries out the restructuring of the rest of the organisation, first by assuring that the organisation has enough funds to function and is heading towards the desired direction. Such actions include assets I reduction, improved cost efficiency and redirected investment. Following the completion of theoretical framework, we carried out field research directed at four stakeholders of NEPA. We drew up and administered a different questionnaire on Residential Consumers, Commercial and Industrial Consumers, NEPA Staff and Other Interest Groups (Ministries and other Parastatals) to capture the perception of these groups on the performance of NEPA. The responses from the questionnaires have been analysed and reported in the study. Our findings show that NEPA is characterised by the indicators of corporate decline such as: • poor management • weak finance team • high cost structure • bureaucracy The combined effect of these is poor performance in product quality and loss of revenue as shown in its operating records. The first attempt to improve product quality of NEPA in 1972 by merging the two bodies (ECN and NDA) into one body failed to produce noticeable effect. The corporation has therefore continued to decline over the years and the consumers had to tolerate the situation as there was no ready alternative source of power supply. Recognising the problem, another attempt to turn NEPA around was made in 1989, by adopting turnaround strategies which involved changing top management and restructuring the organisation. It still did not improve its performance because the new management was not better than the one replaced. The corporation thus continues to decline. Recognising NEPA's operational problems and managerial difficulties, we recommended corporate turnaround strategies that will lessen the burden on the executives and make NEPA an efficient company. We have recommended change of management, preferably with an outsider, as the first step in the corporate turnaround process in NEPA. This step was followed by the recommendation of large scale reorganisation of the industry. The reorganisation involves the formation of a Holding Company out of the current headquarters, with drastically reduced workforce and ten subsidiary companies. Our recommendations involve the creation of a generating company, a national grid company and eight distributing and supplying companies. We appreciate the resource implications of our recommendations, which involves the injection of new funds, new personnel requirement and the government's approval. The subsidiary companies would inherit most of their staffing requirements from the current NEPA staff, except for Distribution and Supply companies, where a large number of new personnel should be employed. The staffing requirements of Distribution and Supply companies will differ from the other companies in the group. The high calibre professional staff needs shall be met by offering appropriate incentives, comparable to those in the private sector. The corporation has already got premises that will house the subsidiary companies and funding will come from both improved operating and financial performance as well as a one off grant from the government. Despite these resource implications, we are convinced that if NEPA is keen to improve on its performance, our recommendations will be the way out for the corporation.

The thesis analyses the case studies of three truck manufacturing firms with the purpose of contributing to the body of knowledge concerning technical change in the manufacturing sector of developing countries. This is done by a) identifying some of the factors which influence technological efforts of the three major truck manufacturing firms in Turkey, b) analysing the nature (direction) and rate of technical change in the sector, and c) examining underlying mechanisms in the process of technical change by which additional technological capabilities have been acquired and workers' contribution to this process. Such knowledge forms an essential base on which an effective technology policy and industrialisation strategy can be formulated to promote post-investment technological development within firms. Part I first draws attention to the lack of empirically based analys is of techni ca 1 change whi ch takes into account macroeconomi c conditions and inter-firm differences in examining the main aspects of technical change such as determinants, the nature and rate of change. Then it gi ves an hi stori ca 1 revi ew of the Turk ish economy and the development of the Turkish automotive industry which is greatly influenced by industrialisation policies. This macroeconomic background provi des an understandi ng of the economi c envi ronment in which the case study firms operate and enables us to evaluate their technological behaviour. Part II presents the case studies of the three Turkish truck firms. It explores the firms' characteristics and historically exami nes thei r phys i ca 1 and economi c performance, and techno 1 ogi ca 1 efforts to generate technical change. Then it explores how and to what extent the macroeconomi c condi t ions i nfl uence thei r efforts for change. Part III draws lessons from the case studies by analysing significance of industrialisation policies that greatly determine the macroeconomic conditions and their effect on determining the nature, rate and impact of techni ca 1 change. Then it gi ves an i nter-fi rm comparative analysis to identify firm level factors which are also influential in the firms' technological dynamism.

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Throughout the history, U.S. alternative press has published against the grain of mainstream media and politics and on tight budgets. In fact, it remains the political economic dilemma for any critical media project that the financial resources it needs are in the same capitalism society it criticizes. Using a political economy approach, this thesis examined how political economic factors including ownership models, means of support and the government role influence the balance between the editorial goals and business performance of the two alternative or independent publications: The Nation, a privately-owned newsmagazine providing critical opinions and investigative journalism on nationwide issues, and The Texas Observer, a 501(c) (3) nonprofit biweekly covering stories ignored by the mainstream press in the state of Texas. Through in-depth interviews with staffers of the two publications and primary and second sources analysis, this thesis demonstrates the tension between editorial ideals and financial needs that are affected by several political economic factors. It also shows that both alternative papers are committed to democratic altruism and watchdog journalism whenever they deal with political economic pressures. / text

This thesis presents a mainly empirical analysis of the phenomenon of recent immigration to the Athens conurbation and of the relationship of foreign workers to the Athenian lahour market. The research focuses on three of the main groups of foreign migrant workers from Third World and Eastern European countries: Albanians, Egyptians and Filipinos. After an analysis of the nature and characteristics of the Greek economy and labour market the research is built around three major topics: the differentiation of migrant groups within the context of Greek labour market segmentation; the relation between immigration and the informal, underground economy; and the impact of immigration on the spatial and social division of labour in Athens. Methodologically, the main effort of the study was a field survey of recent immigrants in Athens, undertaken over a period of seven months hetween August 1995 and February 1996. The first three chapters of the thesis contain the theoretical hackground to the empirical research. Chapter 4 contains a detailed presentation of methodological tools and approaches adopted during the field research in Athens. Chapter 5 presents the general background and profile data of 141 immigrants interviewed, including such variables as age, sex, time and means of arrival, education and training, reasons for migrating to Greece, family circumstances, remittance behaviour, and plans for the future. Chapter 6 is an extended discussion of the interactions between immigrants and the Athens labour market, based partly on a detailed analysis of the city's economy and social formation, and pattly on interview results. Chapter 7 looks more closely at the day-to-day lives of the immigrants in Athens, focusing in particular on their housing arrangements and their impact on the social geography of the city. Finally Chapter 8 concludes the thesis. It shows how the empirical findings to the different research questions are related to each other and how these findings are related to past and contemporary theories of migration. The strengths and weaknesses of the research are evaluated and suggestions for further research made.

This thesis investigates the processes and influences that have driven regional economic development in Romania during the period 1945-95. One of the central aims is to examine whether the change from a planned to a market economy has significantly influenced the spatial distribution of economic activity. The initial part of the thesis exammes the theoretical perspectives of Romanian regional development challenging the neo-classical hypothesis and proposing that Romanian development patterns, under both the socialist andThe thesis presents an investigation of the patterns of national and regional development during 1945-95. One of the central messages that emerges is the importance of national and regional industrial structures to overall economic performance. It is argued that while the transition of the socialist economy to the market model may involve a fundamental change in the national and regional economic framework, both systems prioritised national growth over regional concerns through the focus on economic efficiency at the expense of equity considerations. The empirical results presented in the thesis reveal that economic growth free market, are best placed within the context of cumulative growth and agglomeration economies. within Romania is concentrated on previously developed regional centres. Both the socialist and free market systems failed to generate any fundamental change in the distribution of regional economic activity, although the introduction of the market economy is found to be marginally divergent. This is itself a rejection of the argument that the introduction of market forces will lead to a greater convergence in regional economic activity

This thesis focuses on the relationship between food expenditures and the economy. In analogous fashion to Maxwell 2013 which calculated energy expenditures as a percentage of national and global gross domestic product (GDP), this thesis examined three available food expenditure datasets to study the relationship between food expenditures as a percentage of GDP and economic growth. The analysis calculated two metrics, Primary Consumption Expenditures and Final Consumption Expenditures which were used to compare the available datasets and create a more robust hybrid dataset containing data for 178 countries with an average time span of 40 years that was used to study the relationship between global economic growth and food expenditures. Historical evidence does not suggest that food has imposed a limit on economic growth; however, recent trends over the past decade associated with biofuel production suggest the global economy has entered a new era with rapidly rising food prices and expenditures. As food resources continue to be used as industrial energy inputs, it is critical to include food expenditures in further analysis of potential impacts energy expenditures may have on economic growth. / text