Many developing countries have not benefited from the technological changes that have taken place over the last 30 years. Uganda has been no exception. The country continues to have over 30 percent of its people below the poverty line. This is despite the appropriateness of macro economic policy and government action in many of these countries. Even in the developed countries, slowness in growth has been attributed to lack of enterprise rather than policy and government action. For this reason, governments and multilateral institutions like the World Bank, have attributed the continued poverty or the slow growth to other factors like governance, institutions but more importantly, entrepreneurship. Classical, and indeed neo-classical economists, did not pay much attention to entrepreneurship as a determinant of growth and therefore this relationship has not been explored in most of the research that has attempted to explain determinants of economic growth. It was Schumpeter who suggested that the entrepreneur had a role in economic growth but no empirical studies have been undertaken to verify this. Thus was until recently when the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) studies were initiated in 1999 led by Paul Reynolds who had done some previous research in this area. The current GEM studies have focused on small firms and yet the model has existing large firms. This study identifies this gap and it is that gap that the study attempts to explain. Having no firm theoretical foundation, the study adopted an inductive approach using mainly qualitative techniques but also adopted quantitative techniques given the nature of the relationship among the variables. Theoretical sampling was used initially to identify the study population. The study identified large scale portfolio entrepreneurs as a unit of analysis and Uganda being a small country, it was possible to assume some kind of laboratory conditions in which the study was undertaken. The study’s overall aim was to establish whether a relationship existed between entrepreneurship and economic growth. To achieve this, the study examined the patterns of growth in the Uganda economy between 1962-2005, the opportunities, the macro economic policy in place, the opportunities that emerged and the role of the entrepreneur in those conditions. The study also examined the emergence of new industries in the economy, the start-ups and exits of firms in the respective industries and the role of the entrepreneur and how this related to economic growth. To secure the data, the study used a case study design for portfolio entrepreneurs combined with a survey for small and medium and corporate entrepreneurs. Unstructured interviews were conducted with portfolio entrepreneurs and self administered questionnaires were used for the other respondents. Secondary data were collected from numerous published sources. The study confirmed that there existed a relationship between macro economic policy and economic growth which confirmed assertions by mainstream economists. The study also established that a relationship existed between entrepreneurship and economic growth. The Uganda economy as a small economy gives that ability to see the relationship. The study reveals, using the Uganda economy, that large scale portfolio entrepreneurs have an important role to play in orchestrating economic growth through their activities of start-up, job creation and infrastructural development. The study further confirms that liberalization of an economy as in the case of Uganda creates opportunities and that these opportunities are seized by entrepreneurs. Portfolio entrepreneurs play a key role in this process. Technology too has an important role among other factors. As an industry is formed, many new firms enter it. This creates competition. Competition may lead to development of new technologies, products, services and processes. This leads to firm exiting the industry. The start-up and exit of firms in an industry leads to job creation and loss. It is this process that Schumpeter called the creative destruction where job creation and job losses that creates growth. This study brings out the importance of the large scale portfolio entrepreneurs, how they start business, perceive opportunities, and compete. The conclusions from the study are that a relationship exists between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth, and that large scale entrepreneurs have a major role to play in an economy. They are job creators, tax payers, wealth creators, and through the multiplier effect. There is need for deductive studies in an attempt to confirm this relationship.

This research uses a novel policy writing method to explore young people’s subjective understandings of the problems of poverty. Working with five groups of young people, aged 11 – 21, from some of the most financially deprived areas of England, it sought to draw out and explore their “policy imaginary”, or the way they viewed the problems of poverty through a lens of ideal policy responses. It unpacks these young people’s policy imaginaries, and the life-narratives they discussed alongside these imaginaries, within a discourse of individualisation. Across four articles, it demonstrates and explores the complexities and ambiguities of these young people’s thinkings. This thesis begins by suggesting that many of the problems of poverty they identify as important to their lives are structural, and that they understanding the role of collective and political agency, rather than their own individual agency, in ending poverty. It then more specifically explores their understandings of their neighbourhoods and houses, which suggests that individualised factors often identified in other research, such as social contagion and epidemic neighbourhood effects, are not what they identify as most important in their local areas. It concludes by identifying a policy gap emerging along similar theoretical lines. Here, this research suggests that much of the policy directed towards these young people focuses on individualised problems, and their individual agency as a route of out poverty, but that this sort of policy response is not what these young people felt was needed. However, this is not to suggest that these young people downplayed or dismissed their own agency in charting their life-pathways. Indeed, as much previous literature has found, these young people spoke fluently about the agency and opportunities they have in their lives, often seeming ‘hyper-agentic’. However, this thesis suggests that exploring these young people’s policy imaginary appears to create a medium through which they can talk both about their agency and the constraints and limitations low-incomes generate. It allowed them to bridge their highly agentic biographies to their socially structured histories, as they saw them.

<p>This dissertation explores the emergence of Millennium Development and the promise to end poverty by 2015. After exploring the global scale phenomena, the project turns to the implementation of the "end of poverty" in the model Millennium Village of Sauri, Kenya.</p> / Dissertation

Public housing in the United States has been a controversial sociopolitical topic since the years of the Great Depression. The issue of appropriate and secure habitation for the country's "deserving poor" continues to be of great importance as government subsidies become scarce in the early 21st century. This dearth of support for public housing is even more evident and prominent along the United States-Mexico border of South Texas, a territory described as having a third world environment. The dissertation is a narrative history of public housing in Laredo, Texas, a border community. Compiled from news media records and the archives of the Laredo Housing Authority, the study gives insight into methods used by this authority to achieve decent habitation for the underprivileged residents of one of the poorest cities in the United States. After a historical background of Laredo, the study follows a chronological development of federally funded housing through the six decades that began in 1938. The study accentuates the continuing need for such housing as its sponsoring federal agency; the Department of Housing and Urban Development fails to properly fund its subsidiary programs and projects. Principal governmental and nongovernmental sources substantiate the dearth of appropriate housing, with the author providing further insight to his native city's plight. The conclusion outlines how funding, together with higher upkeep and energy costs, will continue in a downward spiral and will lead to an increase in the underserved poor population.

M.Comm. / Each year, in an attempt to alleviate poverty, government invests large parts of the budget to provide infrastructure to poor households in South Africa. This not only necessitates an understanding of the effectiveness of government’s infrastructure delivery rate to address poverty in South Africa, but also raises important questions on how the poor can be identified. In recent years, countries have moved away from traditional broad poverty measures such as gross national income (GNI) per capita and Human Development Index (HDI). Information on poverty and other household information are more often collected through household surveys. From these surveys, monetary and non-monetary poverty measures can be used to identify the poor. By making use of a monetary poverty measure such as expenditure, per capita household expenditure can be calculated. Households are divided into quintiles based on their per capita household expenditure, and the bottom 20 and 40 per cent are usually the benchmark for households to be identified as being poor. This is analysed in terms of the poor’s access to services and other household characteristics. Qualitative regression models have gained more recognition in econometrics, especially in the social sciences field. Information collected from household surveys is often qualitative, or binary in nature. Due to the non-linear nature of binary-dependent variable models, logit and probit models were appropriate for this study. The maximum likelihood method, within the binary choice framework, was employed to determine the extent to which infrastructure delivery and other household characteristics have an impact on poverty. The results provided empirical evidence that infrastructure investment can significantly reduce the likelihood that a household will be poor, given a set of characteristics.

The paper aims to analyze the development of the shadow banking system in China and its role in the rapid economic growth in China for the past three decades. The shadow banking system supports small and medium sized firms and agricultural development projects. This has an important impact on poverty reduction in China as farmers largely refer to informal financial channels to get credit support for seeds, chemicals and animals. The shadow banking system offers credit supplies to lenders who cannot easily obtain credit from the official banking system. The credit supplies they offered use different financial instruments, come with higher interest rates, and were often disguised as financial products landing within the regulatory framework of the administration. The commercial banks also used the shadow banking financial instruments to meet capital thresholds from the People’s Bank of China. As a result, the shadow banking products create longer credit chains, distort credit flows in the financial system by diverting investments into short-term, high return, more risky financial markets. The turbulences in the interbank transaction market, the financial derivative market, the stock exchange markets (including the main-board, the “second tier” market for SMEs and the “third tier” market for start-ups), and the real estate market are all heavily involved in transactions conducted by the shadow banking entities. The shadow banking system in China has been expanding at a pace beyond the current regulatory structure. The internet P2P investment platforms, for instance, become popular with investors and raise funds up to RMB 1 billion each platform. There exist over thousands of internet investment portals, the most popular one being “Yu E Bao”, offered by Alibaba.com. The traditional regulatory institutions, however, do not cover shadow banking investment activities made online. Neither are insurance offered to insurance made online; as the new deposit insurance scheme only cover deposits made in the official banking system. With the ambition of boosting the internationalization of the RMB, financial deepening and economic reforms in China, the financial regulators in China face the dilemma resulting from the regulatory arbitrage associated with the expanding shadow bankinBBC system. Individual investors in China purchase the shadow banking investment products and assume their purchases come with implicit government guarantees, such as wealth management products sold by commercial banks for trust companies and local government investment platforms. On the other hand, it is critical for investors to make rational investments; thus, regulators are obliged to remind investors of risks related to the shadow banking products, that the fantasy of governments repaying failing shadow banking investments will be not realized. It is also the responsibility of the regulators to divert funds collected by the shadow banking entities to long-term investments to build up industrial bases. The financial deepening in China required the transformation of the shadow banking entities and financial products offered into ones with adequate capital cushions and sufficient liquidity. The internationalization of the RMB necessates the opening up of the capital, hence financial account in China. However, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the hyperinflation resulting from the dollarization in Latin America has led the Chinese regulators to be cautious in conducting currency liberalization and financial reforms. The opening up of the financial account with the liberalization of the exchange rate regime doubles the financial risks, increases the possibility of financial crises, and may result in the stagnation of economic growth. The function of the central bank as the lender of the last resort demands effective and prudential regulations for SIFIs, and also seeks to functioned to boost market confidence. At this critical turning point of the Chinese economy, defining the role of the shadow banking system, bringing them into the regulatory framework, and identifying risks created should be the priority of the financial regulators in China.

The developmental challenges confronting Lesotho range from a prevalence of poverty to a lack of safety and security. These problems directly affect in many ways the well-being of the people living in this country. The belief is strong that lack of integration in tackling the challenges of subsistence and protection needs leads to poor performance on poverty reduction and an inability to guarantee public security in the Kingdom. The principal objective of this study is to investigate factors leading to lack of integration in tackling the subsistence and protection needs in the Kingdom of Lesotho. This objective is broken down into three questions: What are the factors leading to the lack of integration in addressing subsistence and protection needs of the people of Lesotho? What are the trends in tackling subsistence and protection needs in Lesotho? What are the possible strategies in the integration of subsistence and protection needs in Lesotho? The two approaches were utilised to investigate the above questions. The first advance was based on exploring data available in the form of text books, journals and official publications. The second step was based on fieldwork carried out around Maseru, Lesotho. The results were presented, analysed and discussed in the report. The findings indicated that poverty surprisingly is no simple phenomenon. In fact, it is a deadly issue with little attention paid to it. Poverty and the issue of safety and security affect everyone as they are social issues. Secondly, some people see poverty as an excuse for people to commit crime and threaten people’s safety and security. Thirdly, while there is a clear understanding about social crime prevention, there remains a problem in developing good initiatives for poverty alleviation and crime prevention. Finally, it is vital for the country to ii integrate poverty and security sector policies in order to achieve sustainable development. The research makes recommendations which would enhance an integrated approach in dealing with issues of subsistence and protection. Efforts should include better public policies intended to shape the infrastructure, economic, social, political and institutional forms in the country. This will be a pathway to improving quality of life and security as people rank poverty and crime among the top concerns that they have in everyday life. Finally, proper policies will begin to bridge the increasing gap between the rich and the poor that remains a cause for concern

Understanding the triggers of the intention was, is and will be at the heart of scholars’ preoccupations when dealing with the universe of entrepreneurship. This unique pioneering research aimed at comparing the Malagasy main ethnic groups in terms of measures of cultural dimensions and perceived desirability and examining the effects of this perceived desirability on the relations between cultural dimensions and entrepreneurial intention. A non-experimental cross-sectional survey, based on a cluster sampling with quota approach comprising three sub-samples of ethnic groups and a structured questionnaire directly administrated by trained interviewers, was the source of data of the research. The use of relevant robust statistical tests characterised the data processing of the research, which revealed that there is no important difference in the measures of cultural dimensions among main ethnic groups in Madagascar’s rural areas. The level of perceived desirability and the relationships between cultural dimensions and entrepreneurial intention are not importantly moderated by perceived desirability among the main ethnic groups in Madagascar’s rural areas. Furthermore, it has been discovered that to some extent, Madagascar would not be a country of ethnic diversity and beginning to understand the Malagasy entrepreneurial profile based on cultural dimension, perceived desirability and entrepreneurial intention is possible. Within the context of an unprecedented level of poverty of the population of Madagascar, which strangles the way to a harmonious and sustainable development, the findings of the research would make an invaluable contribution to the setting up or the refining of policies and strategies targeting the promotion of entrepreneurship in general and self-employment in particular. It is broadly acknowledged that the key to alleviating poverty is based on the encouragement of self-employment of all individuals.

Current literature asserts that recipients of social services in South Africa are characterised by their history, race and ethnicity (Pharoah, 2007; Scheurmans and Visser, 2005). This study attempted to either confirm or challenge such assertions, based on the experiences and strategies implemented by Eleos, a unique non‐ profit organisation that is entrenched in communities that are diverse. The primary aim of this study was to explore the ethos of Eleos, in its interventions to address poverty in underprivileged communities. The study drew from two groups of participants. The first sample of eight participants was drawn from the two beneficiary communities of Eleos. One project is located in Booysens West and the other in Danville. The second group of participants were key informants who were drawn from the management committee as well as representatives of the individual projects. The research instruments took the form of two different semi‐structured interview schedules with open‐ended questions. One for key informants and another for beneficiaries. The research design that was used in the study was the case study design and was exploratory in nature. The collected data was transcribed and analysed using ‘thematic content analysis’ or ‘conceptual analysis’. Main findings indicated that donors seemed to impose a more radicalized view of the world, more so than the beneficiaries and organisation it self.

Child abuse is rife and on the increase in South Africa. The review of five theories of child abuse shows that each theory is unitary, limited and isolated and proposes an incomplete understanding of and solution to child abuse. The ineffectiveness of prevention, intervention actions against child abuse and the poor management and control of child abuse cases are the consequence of unfocussed and disintegrated policies and programmes biased towards overestimated poor economic conditions. This research argues that poor economic conditions are not the sole important variables contributing to child abuse. This hypothesis is confirmed by the observation of the Memorial Institute‟s child abuse database. The purpose of this research is therefore to facilitate a clear understanding of child abuse in order to assist decision making for the prevention of, interventions against and management of child abuse cases. The research proposes the Integrated Modelled Theory that combines variables from different theories to facilitate a clear understanding of child abuse and consequently inform prevention, intervention and management actions through integrated and focused policies and programmes.