This thesis gives an overall view of measuring efficiencies in the Egyptian textile and apparel industry via stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA). Differences between the SFA and the DEA can lead to different estimates for some, or all of the units in an analysis. Measuring efficiency through production process, (inputs and outputs), lacking factors affecting supply chain operations and other key factors, such as value-adding capabilities, exchange rates, time, inventory turnover, quality, logistics, etc. can lead to inaccurate measures. Thus, to ensure accurate efficiency measures, these factors have to be considered. Techniques used are; SFA time-varying and metafrontier. Constructing a single production frontier based on all data points would cause an unfitting benchmark due to differences in production technologies, location, ownership type, etc. Hence, metafrontier allows grouping firms with similar characteristics into a separate group frontier for each region with single metafrontier applied to all groups. Empirical results show clear variability in efficiencies between private and public firms and shows that efficiency scores vary, when assessed against the metafrontier. The evidence also shows the major role of the supply chain factors in improving efficiencies for public firms.

This thesis consists of three chapters on post-reform Chinese business cycles and alternative methods for solving non-linear rational expectations models. Using quarterly data for the period 1980-2009, Chapter 1 examines the effects of aggregate demand and supply shocks on aggregate fluctuations in China. It further decomposes demand shocks into money supply, money demand and fiscal shocks as in the IS-LM-PC model by applying both long- and short-run restrictions in the context of the structural VAR proposed by Galí (1992). The results show that the estimated impulse responses, in terms of the supply and the three demand shocks, match well with the predictions of the theory. However, as the forecast error variance decompositions show, supply shocks are the main source of fluctuations, accounting for about 89% of output variations in the short-run. Given the nature of this transition economy, this may indicate that there are still institutional obstacles due to incomplete economic reform which prevents the market mechanism from working fully. Despite the overall dominance of supply shocks, the historical decomposition of the five cycles in output between 1983 and 2009 detects important roles played by various demand shocks in some sub-periods. The above results are robust to alternative choices of data for money and interest rate. In Chapter 2, an RBC model with utility generating government consumption and productive public capital is calibrated to annual Chinese data for the post-reform period 1978-2006. The main findings are: (i) the model generates a reasonable overall account of the business cycles in the Chinese economy; (ii) TFP shocks mainly contribute to the good fit of the model, whilst the two fiscal policy shocks help to further improve the model's performance; (iii) our results are robust to alternative calibrations such as high and low capital shares, weights of components in utility and constant return to scale aggregate production function in public capital; and (iv) the shock to the ratio of government consumption to output delivers a dominant negative wealth effect, whilst the shock to the ratio of government investment to output can generate significant positive wealth effects in both the short- and long-run. The third chapter solves the benchmark New Keynesian model using the log-linearization method, second order approximation and the parameterized expectations algorithm (PEA). The results show that the three solution methods display varying degrees of quantitative differences in simulated population moments, distributions, policy functions and impulse response functions. In particular, the generated price dispersions are significantly different across solution methods. The accuracy evaluations in terms of Judd's criteria and Marcet's statistical test show that the PEA performs better than the other two methods, particularly when solving the price-adjustment equation. This result is robust to a number of alternative calibrations.

This thesis makes use of recently collected UK Community Innovation Survey data to investigate 3 areas that allow to characterise and thus understand more clearly the innovation process in the UK. Firstly strategies of innovation used by firms are identified. Next the determinants of innovation, that is factors driving innovation inputs and outputs, are estimated. Thirdly this work examines the effectiveness of financial public support towards innovation. This also allows to establish which firms are more likely to be in receipt of public support and thus whether government innovation policy is in line with its objectives. Furthermore in this thesis a measure of absorptive capacity for the CIS is created, to see whether this proxy contributes in explaining innovative activities and the receipt of public support towards innovation. Similarly a measure of appropriability is generated for use as an explanatory variable in the estimation of the determinants of innovation. Both of these measures permit to find out if their latent variables have nonlinear effects in explaining propensity and extent of innovative spending. All these aspects have not received attention in previous literature, in large part due to the novelty of the data used. Besides the empirical evidence gained on the above, the addition to the literature of this thesis lies in examining several CIS survey rounds together. For one this serves as a robustness check for the conducted applications and on the other hand it allows investigating the comparability of the survey rounds. For this work the CIS 4, the CIS 5 and the CIS 6 are used as they are the most similar and comparable samples of UK businesses to date. Nevertheless it was found that differences in terms of design, wording and exclusion of responses to some question sets in the different surveys impedes their use for trend analysis and panel data analysis. Something the data collecting agencies need to address in the future. Despite these issues the conducted investigation has provided useful insights into innovation as it takes place in the UK. The first empirical chapter has been able to identify two major modes of innovation as captured by the survey. A ‘traditional’ or ‘linear’ strategy aimed at introducing product and process innovations, relying on innovative activities such as R&D and also making use of sources of information, more strongly from market sources then from science sources. Secondly a ‘dynamic’ or ‘systemic’ strategy also involving innovative activities such as R&D but more strongly making use of knowledge sources from science as well as relying on cooperation. The interpretation of this “blue skies strategy” which is not directly linked to achieving technological outputs is that it generates knowledge that helps to keep abreast of market developments and to be ready to spot opportunities in line with the literature on dynamic capabilities thus the identified strategies allow for a plausible interpretation congruent with innovation theory. In this chapter the aforementioned measure of appropriation and absorptive capacity were also successfully generated. These were then shown to play a significant role in explaining innovative activities in the subsequent empirical chapter, both exhibiting decreasing returns to scale. Following the CDM methodology this work has confirmed that knowledge capital as proxied by predicted R&D spending intensity is as important in generating service innovations as it is in stimulating goods innovations for the UK. The results also show that absorptive capacity not only indirectly impacts the likehood of introducing service innovations through its effect on knowledge capital as for goods innovations but also directly. This suggests that services once conceived further have to be tailored to individual customer’s needs. Hence absorptive capacity is specifically important in a developed economy dominated by service sector industries. At the same time the fit of the models confirmed that the CIS could do better at explaining service and process innovations by soliciting more information that are likely to cause these types of innovation. Finally further support for the innovation productivity nexus has been found. The last empirical chapter then established that absorptive capacity is also an important factor explaining the likehood of firms to be in receipt of financial public support towards innovation. This chapter further concluded that the financial public support towards innovation in the UK has in the recent past been effective at stimulating innovative performance besides just R&D spending. The government’s objective of supporting start-ups, that potentially face difficulties in financing their innovative activities, as well as supporting cooperation, vital for the dissemination of knowledge in the economy, is met according to the results. However SMEs could not be shown to be statistically more likely to be in receipt of public support despite facing the same problems as start-ups, though at least they are not less likely to be in receipt of public support then large firms. This finding stipulates that policy objectives are not achieved with regard to specifically targeting SMEs.

This thesis attempts to address the need for a clear strategy for the supply side in the Egyptian mortgage market. The thesis focuses for the first time on the issues in relation to the role of the bank and non-bank financial institutions in the creation of an effective and sustainable mortgage market that works better for low- and moderate-income households in Egypt as well as the role of these institutions after the mortgage market has reached a certain stage of development. The key research objectives are as follows: 1) to address why Egyptian housing co-operative societies can be seen as important policy agents to expand the mortgage credit beneficiaries base in Egypt; 2) to evaluate the effectiveness of the Egyptian housing co-operative societies as community based organisations and policy agents; 3) to identify and analyse the various economic, social and political factors influencing this effectiveness; 4) to assess the role of the banking institutions (as contextual stakeholders in the immediate environment of the Egyptian housing co-operative societies) in expanding access to mortgage credit and savings in Egypt; and 5) to identify which institutions constrain most the development of an effective and sustainable level of mortgage credit for low- and moderate-income households. In order to address these issues and objectives, the researcher reviewed the theoretical and empirical issues associated with the assessment of mortgage credit intermediation models to identify their reach and the limit of that reach and, implicitly, to examine what needs to be done to close the gap on what would be a more accessible mortgage market. Further, from 2008 to 2010, the researcher surveyed and interviewed a group of banking, co-operative and government officers in Cairo, Egypt. Questions regarding their attitudes towards housing policy and finance in Egypt were posed, especially in relation to the provision of mortgage credit in Egypt. The thesis found that Egyptian banking institutions, as agents in carrying out housing policies and finance, enabled the housing co-operative societies as stakeholders to form expectations towards the results of the new reforms with the same framework as they had done before. The survey and interviews showed that housing co-operative societies were dissatisfied with the expected results of recent reforms in the Egyptian housing and mortgage markets. It appears that resistance to the reforms was caused by the fact that housing co-operative societies were not interested. But the thesis found that the unfair distributive results associated with mortgage credit allocation were resented most by housing co-operative societies. Thus, the thesis concludes that to extend the reach of mortgage credit, there needs to be a wider strategy to reform the housing and mortgage markets in Egypt that includes strengthening the role of community institutions such as Egyptian housing co-operative societies based on well defined and structured stakeholder framework.

The 16 publications included in this thesis are the results of a programme of research between 1993 and 2009 into the labour market and labour market-related impacts of the large-scale spatially concentrated losses of industrial jobs in Great Britain from the 1970s to the 1990s. The British conventional wisdom has been that labour market recovery was relatively quick, and that the effects were not particularly profound. Continuing labour market distress was mainly ascribed to labour ‘supply-side’ factors rather than to locally deficient labour demand. The research challenges these views. It draws particularly on the British Keynesian tradition, and on authors such as J. F. Kain, John Kasarda and William Julius Wilson from the USA, which experienced similar job losses around a decade earlier. Issues covered include the statistical measurement and spatial variation of unemployment and related economic disadvantage, unemployment disguised as sickness, long-term unemployment, migration and lone parenthood, and there is also analysis of policies on employment and social inclusion. The research shows that ‘Travel-to-Work Areas’ (TTWAs) do not correctly identify the employment ‘fields’ of residents of areas of high unemployment. They have biased errors due to imbalance between commuting inflows and outflows, and obscure the main variation in unemployment on the urban-rural dimension. Three papers on Incapacity Benefit (IB) analyse the dynamics of change in the stock of claimants, investigating the roles played by health status and labour market conditions. The most recent of these papers examines whether the striking fall in IB claims in Glasgow and other former industrial areas in 2003-08 was the result of official interventions or of improving labour market conditions, concluding that it was mainly the latter. A key ‘supply-side’ assumption was that being unemployed in itself makes people less ‘employable’ – the theory of ‘state-dependence’. The paper on long-term unemployment radically challenges this interpretation. It points out that the literature on the relationship between long-term and short-term unemployment has generally failed to consider the appropriate time-lags or the behaviour of the standard measure of long-term unemployment. It shows that the phenomenon which the theory of state-dependence purports to explain does not occur to any significant extent. Outmigration and housing abandonment are significant effects of local job loss. The paper on housing abandonment demonstrates a statistical relationship across England in 1997 between social housing surplus and ‘real unemployment’, while a further paper challenges the view that there was no longer a deficiency of demand for labour in Glasgow and the Clyde Valley in the 1990s by investigating migration patterns. It demonstrates that net flows between individual Scottish areas and the rest of the UK were to a substantial extent determined by changes in labour demand. A new finding is that little adjustment to employment change occurs through migration within Scotland. The large increase in lone parenthood in Great Britain since the 1960s has been strongly correlated across areas with male worklessness. The US literature suggested that this relationship is causal, and this thesis is investigated in two papers. The earlier of these was the first comprehensive published application of this interpretation to the modern British case. A further paper concludes that falling male employment accounted for around half the rise in lone parenthood in Great Britain in 1971-2001. Two of the papers present a comprehensive picture of the geographical distributions of the different groups of disadvantaged people in the labour market, showing that they all conform to a similar pattern which in turn is related to deficient labour demand.

The ultimate financial responsibility for improving educational access, participation, and quality lies with national governments. However, for many countries, particularly the poorest, educational progress depends, to a significant extent, on economic assistance coming from bilateral and multilateral donors. This study tries to understand how donors mobilize and allocate their resources to promote the education sector in the developing world, and to what extent they are successful in doing so. Our primary interest lies in the analysis of donor agencies and their behaviours, rather than the situations of education aid recipient countries. In addition to a chapter for the introduction and another for the conclusion, we assess education aid with the help of three interlinked studies. First, we look at how donors resource transfers have affected education sector achievements in education aid recipient countries. Second, we examine how donors commit their education aid resources for education in developing countries. Third, we present the determinants of the donors efforts (the total volume of education aid that a donor country makes available to the all recipients) in providing foreign aid for the education sector.

In this thesis, optimum experimental designs for a statistical model possessing a skewed error distribution are considered, with particular interest in investigating possible parameter dependence of the optimum designs. The skewness in the distribution of the error arises from its assumed structure. The error consists of two components (i) random error, say V, which is symmetrically distributed with zero expectation, and (ii) some type of systematic error, say U, which is asymmetrically distributed with nonzero expectation. Error of this type is sometimes called 'composed' error. A stochastic frontier model is an example of a model that possesses such an error structure. The systematic error, U, in a stochastic frontier model represents the economic efficiency of an organisation. Three methods for approximating information matrices are presented. An approximation is required since the information matrix contains complicated expressions, which are difficult to evaluate. However, only one method, 'Method 1', is recommended because it guarantees nonnegative definiteness of the information matrix. It is suggested that the optimum design is likely to be sensitive to the approximation. For models that are linearly dependent on the model parameters, the information matrix is independent of the model parameters but depends on the variance parameters of the random and systematic error components. Consequently, the optimum design is independent of the model parameters but may depend on the variance parameters. Thus, designs for linear models with skewed error may be parameter dependent. For nonlinear models, the optimum design may be parameter dependent in respect of both the variance and model parameters. The information matrix is rank deficient. As a result, only subsets or linear combinations of the parameters are estimable. The rank of the partitioned information matrix is such that designs are only admissible for optimal estimation of the model parameters, excluding any intercept term, plus one linear combination of the variance parameters and the intercept. The linear model is shown to be equivalent to the usual linear regression model, but with a shifted intercept. This suggests that the admissible designs should be optimal for estimation of the slope parameters plus the shifted intercept. The shifted intercept can be viewed as a transformation of the intercept in the usual linear regression model. Since D_A-optimum designs are invariant to linear transformations of the parameters, the D_A-optimum design for the asymmetrically distributed linear model is just the linear, parameter independent, D_A-optimum design for the usual linear regression model with nonzero intercept. C-optimum designs are not invariant to linear transformations. However, if interest is in optimally estimating the slope parameters, the linear transformation of the intercept to the shifted intercept is no longer a consideration and the C-optimum design is just the linear, parameter independent, C-optimum design for the usual linear regression model with nonzero intercept. If interest is in estimating the slope parameters, and the shifted intercept, the C-optimum design will depend on (i) the design region; (ii) the distributional assumption on U; (iii) the matrix used to define admissible linear combinations of parameters; (iv) the variance parameters of U and V; (v) the method used to approximate the information matrix. Some numerical examples of designs for a cross-sectional log-linear Cobb-Douglas stochastic production frontier model are presented to demonstrate the nonlinearity of designs for models with a skewed error distribution. Torsney's (1977) multiplicative algorithm was implemented in finding the optimum designs.

This thesis is a contribution towards the macroeconomic and monetary analysis of developing countries. A fully-fledged macroeconometric model is theoretically specified, econometrically estimated and dynamically simulated for policy analysis. The model contains demand side, supply side, balance of payments accounts, government accounts and a financial sector. The model is tested using regional data consisting of seven Asian Developing Countries, namely, Fiji, India, Malayasia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. A regional econometric model for Asian LDCs was lacking in the realm of global econometric models and this study is an attempt to bridge this gap by building a first ever model for this region. In the demand side of the model volume equations for consumption, investment, exports and imports and an equation for export prices are estimated. The supply side is derived from wage and price equations following a production function approach which is neo-classical in spirit. Inflation is modelled as a function of the divergence between demand and supply. Government accounts and the balance of payments accounts are fully specified. Most of the existing macroeconomic models in LDCs context abstract from modelling a financial sector. The implicit reason for this is that the financial sector in these economies is underdeveloped; therefore, little scope exists for monetary policy instruments. We have developed a detailed bank based financial sector model where all the balance sheet flows of the Central Bank and commercial banks are at the centre stage. We show that monetary policy instruments are effective in affecting macro activity. The interlinkage between the financial and the real sector comes not through the cost of capital, rather it arises due to income-expenditure flows and the real financial asset stocks. Such linkages operate even if the financial sector is undeveloped.

This work provides an empirical examination of the relationship between macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we exploit non linear econometric methods to analyse the information content of the term structure of interest rates. We find that both monetary and financial variables are useful to predict the future evolution of economic activity.

This thesis explores the enabling conditions and challenges two entrepreneurs interpret critical in their relationships in the start-up phase of 5i, a social entrepreneurial international new venture (INV). The thesis delivers both interpretive ethnographic and auto-ethnographic accounts, weaving the voices of the two co-founders of 5i into a textual dialogue. The reader explores the relationship between the two entrepreneurs, and their relationships with their network partners, as they develop 5i into a small, innovative social entrepreneurial consulting practice that delivers innovative business incubation and financial engineering services from the firm's home base in New Delhi, India into rural markets in Brazil and China, as well as into the company's home market in India. The two entrepreneurs put to use their team and network relationships to mobilize knowledge, know-how, and capital; marshalling resources for their firm far beyond those they control. However, the entrepreneurs' relationships deliver more than functional, resource-based benefits. It is the, shared mission-related values, and the trust and the open communications they engender, in the entrepreneurs' relationships that emerge as key enabling conditions in the development of 5i. When mission-related values are not shared, significant challenges are confronted. The research presented in this thesis emphasizes interpretation and understanding grounded in the formation processes in a new enterprise, there where it is happening, not in rational explanation and prediction. Messy, thick, interpretive ethnographic and auto ethnographic texts provide rich detail which is then provoked through engagement with interpretive grounded theory methods to offer three pragmatic theoretical threads that contribute to our understanding of the roles of TMT and network relationships in the creation of social enterprises that move across international borders from birth. This combination of interpretive methods will not meet the positivist cry for testable hypothesis and universal theories, but it is hoped these methods deliver a compelling, local story. This thesis works to bring the voice of the entrepreneur back into research on entrepreneurship.