Unemployment is the most popular indicator of the country’s economy. As popular as it is, it remains difficult to define and to measure. This is the reason why different economists have different views of where South Africa really is as far as the unemployment rate is concerned. Female unemployment in South Africa is relatively high and much attention should be given on that issue. Some females are uneducated; others lack the skills while others are discouraged due to lack of vacant positions within their area. The consequences of unemployment are devastating and remain one of the most significant challenges for South Africa (Naude & Serumaga-Zake, 2001:261). These consequences range from decreased standards of living to degradation of society as a whole through crime, and community unrest (Barker, 1995:113). This study aims to investigate the factors that have an influence on the employment status of females in Bophelong Township, to determine if variables such as age, marital status, education level and income have any causal effect on the employment status of females. The results of this study will then help policy makers to create and design strategies that will help achieve the objective of unemployment reduction. / MCom (Economics) North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

No description available.

This thesis is about social class and economic inequality, using the Goldthorpe class schema. It tests theories claiming that social class is increasingly irrelevant to inequality and people's life-chances with data on incomes and material living standards from the British Household Panel Survey. It covers the period over which the survey ran, i.e. 1991-2008. During this time many prominent social theories dismissed class analyses while others sought to retain the class concept but dismissed its economic foundations, seeking to ground it in culture instead. Economic inequality has not figured highly on the agenda of class analysts, at least not those working with the Goldthorpe class schema. There is a substantial body of work on mobility, voting behaviour, income poverty and material deprivation, but inequality in a broader sense has for the most part been neglected. This thesis is a step towards rectifying this situation. Thus it provides new information about within-career social mobility as well as income inequality within and between classes, on whether income mobility reduces class inequalities over time, and cast light on class inequalities in material living standards. The findings suggest that class is far from irrelevant to economic inequality. Class differences in incomes are persistent, between class inequalities contribute more to inequality overall than within-class inequalities, and while income mobility does reduce class inequalities over time it is not to the extent that supports the hypothesis that class is irrelevant to people's economic fortunes.

I use the German Socio-Economic Panel to explore three dimensions of couples' career success: career input (hours), career output (wages) and happiness. I focus on West German parents because, until recently, they faced low levels of state-level childcare support and adverse attitudes towards maternal employment. I investigate the extent to which couples specialize in paid work in the long term. Previous approaches – even those using couple-level longitudinal data – failed to explore this fully, instead examining men and women separately, or a single transition. I develop a “dual curve” approach and find that even among the 1956-65 female birth cohort (which faced low state-level support for dual employment) only a fifth of all couples adopt full specialization in later life. A sizable proportion – a third – moves into dual fulltime employment, while half of highly educated couples adopt such employment. Highly educated women are not only less likely to permanently specialize but also more likely to try working full-time, possibly because their partners' comparative advantages are lower. I explore whether the take-up of work hour flexibility relates to rises in both the respondent’s and their partner’s wages. Men and women benefit from working flexibly, even when controlling for selection into work hour flexibility with growth-curve and fixed effects analysis. Moreover, there is a positive cross-partner wage effect, which is particularly pronounced for mothers, suggesting that men – the main users of the policy – use this measure to support their wives' careers. Are dual career couples (equal human capital investment) happier than specializing couples? I create a human capital measure to account for differential human capital during periods of non-employment, which has been ignored in past analyses. I find that women in dual career couples are unhappier when the child is young but happier later in life. Conversely, women who give precedence to their partner’s career in terms of human capital investment grow unhappier.

This thesis studies interconnections between macroeconomic environment and non-performing loans ratio (NPL) of banking loans provided to households in the Czech Republic in years 2005-2014. This analysis serves as tool for macroprudential policy to detect potential risks before negative consequences occur. The thesis examines mutual relations between households' non-performing loans ratio and variables capturing macroeconomic environment such as GDP growth, unemployment rate, CPI, interest rate and exchange rate. For purposes of this analysis, vector autoregressive approach and vector error correction model are applied. Based on impulse response analysis, most of expected relations are confirmed. Generally, favorable macroeconomic conditions increase payback capacity of households and reduce share of non-performing loans. According to forecast variance decomposition, increase in unemployment rate is the most serious threat for financial stability of the country from the perspective of non-performing rate increase. JEL Classification C32, C52, E21, G21 Keywords Households, indebtedness, financial stability, non-performing loans, Czech Republic, VAR, VECM Author's e-mail h.kroupa@seznam.cz Supervisor's e-mail seidler@email.cz

Housing Situation of Young People in the Czech Republic Abstract The thesis contributes to a discussion of a social stratification and inequalities in society. The aim of the work is to review a housing situation of Czech households, with the emphasis on the age of the head of household, from several complementary perspectives. Housing conditions of young households are described by the concept of the financial and physical affordability of housing on the basis of objective data about their income situation and the cost and quality of housing. Therefore, we can identify households that have limited access to adequate housing e.g. because of their social background or current social position in the society. The paper also examines the subjective opinions of respondents on the quality and the financial burden of housing. To achieve these objectives, data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) of the Czech Statistical Office are analyzed for the years 2005-2011. The analysis also contains the regional perspective, which is used to compare the housing affordability for households living in the different areas of the Czech Republic. Also for this reason results of the thesis could be useful as a basis for housing policy makers. Keywords: young households, housing affordability, housing...

This thesis investigates in what ways the family matters for educational outcomes. Six research questions are answered. First, is family size associated with familial resources? Second, is having a large family associated with lower levels of objective and subjective educational outcomes and has this changed over the 20th century? Third, is there evidence of an association between family size and emotional health and life perspectives of young people? Fourth, is there any evidence of an association between family size and the degree of confidence and sociability? Fifth, do parenting strategies vary by family size? Sixth, is there evidence if a causal relationship between family size and educational outcomes? The British Household Panel Survey, the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England and the ONS Longitudinal Study are used to answer these questions. The key findings from the observational studies are as follows. First, as family size increases there is a reduction in familial resources. Second, as a result of resource dilution there is a reduction in the highest qualification attained; this finding is robust to alternative measures of educational outcomes. Third, there is a positive relationship between family size and reporting poor emotional health and external locus of control. Fourth, there is some evidence that the manner in which the young person socialises varies by family size. Fifth, parenting strategies vary by family size; these strategies are positively associated with GCSE achievement and ameliorate the negative family size association. Sixth, testing the resource dilution model using twins as an exogenous increase in family size found that there is weak evidence of a causal relationship between family size and educational outcomes. This thesis addresses the influence of the family on inequalities in education. The findings have important implications for future research on this topic.

Context: The state of poverty in South Africa is a consequence of the country’s racially segregated past. Coping mechanisms to buffer the experience of poverty have been employed by individuals within households (Klasen & Woolard, 2000). One such coping mechanism is that of intergenerational households. Intergenerational households are well established in South Africa, largely seen in Black families, however very few studies have embarked on the outcomes of adolescents belonging to these households such as concurrent school and labour force participation (Aliber, 2003; Edmonds & Pavcnik, 2005). Intergenerational households experience economic strain that may induce children belonging to these households to seek employment, resulting in children not attending school, having uncompleted schooling or concurrently schooling and participating in the labour force. The objectives of the study are to estimate the level of concurrent schooling and labour force participation amongst adolescents in South Africa and determine the association between residing in intergenerational households and concurrent schooling and labour force participation amongst adolescents. Methods: Secondary data from the South African 2010 Survey of Activities of Young People (SAYP) is used with the sample size of 2 650 116 adolescents aged 7-17 years. Three levels of analysis are employed: univariate: frequency and percentage distribution tables, bivariate: Chi-square (? 2) and multivariate: binary logistic regression. Results: Thirty-one percent of adolescents reside in intergenerational households; 18% in multigenerational and 13% in skip-generational households. The study found that 24.08% of adolescents are concurrently schooling and participating in the labour force. The odds of concurrently schooling and participating in the labour force were higher for adolescents residing in intergenerational households. There is thus an association between residing in intergenerational households and concurrent schooling and LFP amongst adolescents in South Africa. Conclusion: Adolescents residing in intergenerational households have higher odds of concurrently schooling and participating in the labour force. It is thus important to focus on the living conditions such as the experience of poverty and household structures to which adolescents belong in order to understand their experiences and obstacles that may potentially hinder efforts made towards youth education and thus development in the country.

Abstract This dissertation is a study of social reproduction in different classes of migrant households in Emnambithi, a town in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It traces the history of households in this community under the impact of racialised dispossession and migration, and illustrates how households were stratified into distinct classes. The three classes identified are a semi-professional, educated class, a migratory working class, and the marginalised, a segment of the “bantustan” population who never had the possibility of working in the capitalist economy during apartheid. The research then focuses on the gendered nature of social reproduction in households in the post-apartheid era, when this community continues to be shaped by migration. The research illustrates that class-based advantage and disadvantage are reproduced in post-apartheid South Africa. The dissertation analyses the different ways in which household members – predominantly migrant and resident women – deal with daily provisioning and consumption, education and care of the dependants of migrants in the absence of some members of the household. The study argues that social reproduction varies significantly in different classes of households. The class-based and gendered nature of social reproduction has implications for an understanding of developmental needs in post-apartheid South Africa, and this research opens up ways in which job creation and social policies could lead to class-based redress and gender equity.

L’objectif de cette thèse était d’identifier les freins et les leviers aux stratégies d’éradication de la poliomyélite dans les pays en développement puis d’analyser au travers d’un questionnaire les connaissances, attitudes et pratiques vis-à-vis de la vaccination contre la poliomyélite des parents des enfants âgés de 0 à 5 ans au Tchad. Une revue de la littérature a été effectuée en interrogeant la base de données PubMed avec des mots clés et une limitation des articles publiés entre 2010-2015 en anglais et en français pour identifier les freins et les leviers à la vaccination poliomyélite et ensuite une enquête a été mené apures des parents dans ménages de la ville d’Abéché. Les freins le plus cités étaient le refus de la vaccination, l’insécurité et les conflits armés rendant l’accès difficile aux enfants et favorisant la circulation du poliovirus. Beaucoup de pays ont pris de mesures pour améliorer la couverture vaccinale. L’enquête auprès de 210 parents a révélé qu’aucune famille ne possédait de carnet de vaccination de leurs enfants. Cependant, 97% ont déclaré avoir des enfants ayant participé aux campagnes de vaccination de masse. Près de 97 % connaissaient la poliomyélite et 98 % avaient entendu parler des campagnes de vaccination. Ce travail a permis d’identifier plusieurs freins et leviers à l’éradication de la poliomyélite. Au Tchad, les connaissances sur la maladie et le vaccin sont bonnes malgré l’existence de rumeurs concernant notamment les effets secondaires des vaccins. Néanmoins, l’absence de carnet de vaccination a limité l’analyse des résultats de l’enquête, uniquement déclarative avec un taux de vaccination très élevé déclaré. / The aim of this thesis was to identify the brakes and levers for poliomyelitis eradication strategies in developing countries and then to analyze through a questionnaire the knowledge, attitudes and practices vis-à-vis poliomyelitis vaccination for parents of children aged 0-5 in Chad. A review of the literature was conducted by cross-referencing the PubMed database with keywords and a limitation of articles published between 2010-2015 in English and French to identify the barriers and levers to polio vaccination and then a survey to was conducted to relatives in the town of Abeche. The most cited barriers were the refusal of vaccination, insecurity and armed conflict, making access difficult for children and promoting the circulation of poliovirus. Many countries have taken steps to improve immunization coverage. The survey of 210 parents revealed that no family had a vaccination record of their children. However, 97% reported having children who participated in mass vaccination campaigns. Nearly 97% knew about polio and 98% had heard about vaccination campaigns. This work has identified several brakes and levers for the eradication of poliomyelitis. In Chad, knowledge of the disease and the vaccine is good despite rumors about the side effects of vaccines. Nevertheless, the lack of vaccination cards limited the analysis of the results of the survey, only declarative with a very high vaccination rate reported.