Please read the abstract in the 00front part of this document / Dissertation (MSc Agric (Agricultural Economics))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / unrestricted

The scarcity of skills is a global phenomenon, affecting the capacity building, economic growth and development components of all nations. The African continent has been affected by skills shortages, emanating from certain socio-economic factors. This resulted in the ‘brain drain’, emigration and absorption of skilled talent to developed countries, in search of a better standard of living and employment opportunities. The issue of scarce skills in South Africa was identified by the Government in 2006, due to an identified shortage of expertise and proficiencies, required to fill numerous vacant positions within the local government to meet service delivery needs. The identification of skills shortages led to the formulation of macro-economic policies to address the issue of scarce skills and the identification of the most affected professions, which included, inter alia, engineers; technicians; project managers; and architects. Despite the implementation of these policies, underlying factors compound the issue, complicating and limiting remedial efforts. The South African Government is faced with the challenge of providing quality basic services for the public, especially at the local level. The country has since 2010 experienced multiple incidents of service delivery protests, predominantly in the under-developed communities. The Eastern Cape is no exception, as the Nelson Mandela Bay area has experienced protests, concerning poor service delivery, primarily in Walmer Township. The provision of basic services, are of dire necessity to the communities, as the Eastern Cape is one of the poorest provinces in South Africa. The educational system at primary and secondary levels is faced with challenges in the Eastern Cape province. These challenges are the shortage of teachers; poor infrastructure; and teacher absenteeism. This compounds the issue of scarce skills acquisition and development; the volume of skilled, expert and proficient talent available to the municipality, to fill in vacancies, gaps and areas with shortfalls and deficits within the entity, is reduced and minimal, underscoring the depth of the entrenchment of this scarcity of skills issue. The primary focus of the study is to expose the factors contributing to skills shortages and the implications, apropos service delivery, from the municipal workers’ perceptions. The study highlights and describes the factors affecting scarce skills acquisition and development in South Africa, along with providing a background of the Eastern Cape and demonstrating that the shortage of skills, within the Infrastructure and Engineering Department of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, has an impact on the production, efficacy and efficiency of services for communities. The study also emphasises the essentiality of quality leadership and management within the organisation, a pivotal aspect in ensuring the municipality performs at optimal level, meeting organisational goals. This is a critical issue, as the study revealed that sound management and leadership is lacking within the municipality, affecting quality of the service delivery output. The findings of this study further revealed that adequate training and development is lacking in the municipality. This is hampering skills development, outstandingly with regard to technical skills talents, as their training needs are not met.

This work deals with social consequences of population aging in relation to the employment market. Aging of Czech population is, according to Population Projection by 2050, collected by ČSÚ, inevitable. Growing rate of seniors in the population is accompanied by many negative economical and social consequences. Anticipated demographic progression will be especially charge on the social security system, health service, public finance, but also on the employment market. Considerable weight falls on the field of savings, on the productivity of labour, and on the population status. In the scope of the text, situation of labour demand on the emploers' side and labour supply from elder employers is discused as well. To increase the employment rate of elderly people, the measures stimulating labour supply and labour demand are mentioned. This work also contains the analysis of present status of elderly labour force on the labour market according to age, education and region, and the prediction of corporate behaviour change, due to growing rate of seniors as consumers.

Up to the middle of the 1970's most government policies dealing with physician manpower dealt with the problems of increasing the supply of physicians, rather than changing the geographic disparity of physicians between urban and rural areas. In 1983 the British Columbia government introduced legislation (passed in a modified form in 1985) that would restrict certain groups of physicians from obtaining Medical Service Plan billing numbers in certain areas of the province, in an attempt to change the geographic distribution of physicians in this province. Regulation is only one of a number of approaches to altering the distribution of physicians. The purpose of this study is to attempt to recommend other approaches that could be used to alter the geographic distribution of physicians, based on the factors which the residents and interns of British Columbia would consider necessary before they will establish practices in the rural areas of the province. The literature was examined to determine the present supply and distribution of physicians in the province of British Columbia. It was shown that the metropolitan areas had much higher concentrations of physicians than did the non-metropolitan regions. The literature was then searched to determine what types of policies had been used in an effort to change this geographic disparity and also to determine what factors influence physicians to locate their practices where they do. From this research a questionnaire was developed and mailed to all residents and interns registered in the University of British Columbia medical program in the academic year 1984-85. A response rate of 31.8% was obtained in this survey. It was found that many physicians were raised in large communities and planned to locate their practices in similar geographic areas to where they were raised. It was also found that the factors which the residents and interns considered to be the most important fell into the "Fixed Determinant" category, that is factors that are personal preferences of the physician. This makes it very difficult to formulate any type of non-regulatory policy to affect the geographic distribution of physicians in British Columbia / Medicine, Faculty of / Population and Public Health (SPPH), School of / Graduate

In this thesis, we consider improving supply chain and service systems through demand-side management. In Chapters 1 and 2, we focus on a new notion of flexibility that has emerged in e-commerce called consumer flexibility. Motivated by the fact that some customers may willingly provide flexibility on which product or service they receive in exchange for a reward, firms can design flexible options to leverage this consumer flexibility for significant benefit in their operations. In Chapter 1, we consider the context of online retailing where consumer flexibility can be realized through opaque selling, where some specific attributes of the products are not revealed to the customer until after purchase. In Chapter 2, we focus on the context of online booking systems for scheduled services where consumer flexibility can be realized through large time windows. The main findings are on the power of limited flexibility using simple flexible options with just a small fraction of customers willing to be flexible. In Chapter 3, we study the issue of congested elevator queuing systems due to the requirement of social distancing during a pandemic. We propose simple interventions for safely managing the elevator queues, which require no programming of the elevator system and only manage passenger behaviors. The key idea is to explicitly or implicitly group passengers going to the same or nearby floor into the same elevator as much as possible. Simulations and stability analysis show that our proposed interventions significantly reduce queue length and wait time.

We have developed a computerized version of Charles Holt’s classical market game that can be used even in classes with a large audience. The Pit market game gives students intuitive access to the interaction of supply and demand in real-world markets. Even though trade can take place at non-uniform prices in the classroom game, the average price and the quantity traded are usually very close to the equilibrium values predicted by supply and demand curves. The classroom game can also be used for a lively discussion about the efficiency of markets or to show the consequences of taxes and regulatory interventions.

This diploma thesis deals with the situation of emerging private elementary schools in the Czech Republic. As this is a new phenomenon, only recognised in the past few years, there is little detailed evidence that would provide the necessary information about these schools; such as what kind of schools are registered and why they were created. This paper aim is to identify and describe the main types of these schools and understand their functions. The first part is to comprehend the shift in education and stress out the influence and role of new actors. This is achieved through providing the different perspectives on education and through description of supply and demand for education. This new phenomenon is also supported by the Theory of Exit, Voice & Loyalty which explains behaviour of private school's initiators and founders. The thesis also examines different authors' and publications' views on alternative and traditional schooling, private, public and non-public schools and the difficulties in comparison across different educational systems. The practical part and its research offers systematic and objective evaluation of the new schools being established and how they work. It also presents possible reasons for the rise in the number of new schools and, what implications this phenomenon can...

Le premier site de cryptomarché, hébergé dans le darkweb, a été lancé en 2011. Ces plateformes rendent possible la vente de divers produits et services illicites. Depuis, de nombreuses interventions policières ont été effectuées dans le but mettre un frein à leurs activités. Malgré de nombreuses tentatives, les effets de ces opérations se sont avérés limités et temporaires. En effet, les revenus générés par cet écosystème sont en constante augmentation. Récemment, les forces policières ont changé leur approche et ont tenté de nouvelles stratégies pour mettre un terme à ce trafic. L’efficacité de ces interventions reste inconnue, car très peu d’études s’y sont attardées. L’objectif de ce mémoire est donc de comprendre quels sont les impacts des opérations policières non traditionnelles sur les participants des cryptomarchés. À l’aide de données récupérées sur différents forums de discussion orientés sur cet écosystème distinct et sa communauté, nous étudierons les effets de deux opérations policières récentes, soit la fermeture de la plateforme DeepDotWeb, et l’opération DisrupTor. Les principaux résultats démontrent que ces interventions ont ébranlé les activités commerciales de ces sites et ont affecté la confiance des membres de la communauté. Malgré l’augmentation de la perception des risques chez plusieurs, les membres ne sont toutefois pas découragés et tentent de trouver une façon de contourner les obstacles imposés par les interventions des forces de l’ordre, en améliorant la structure en place ou en innovant vers de nouveaux outils technologiques. Cependant, les capacités d’adaptation des participants semblent atteindre une certaine limite, et leur essoufflement est perceptible. / The first cryptomarket, hosted in the darkweb, was launched in 2011. These platforms make it possible to sell various illicit products and services. Since then, numerous police interventions have been carried out with the aim of shutting down their activities. Despite many attempts, the effects of the opreations turned out to be limited and temporary. Indeed, the income generated by these websites is constantly increasing. Recently, the police forces have changed their approach and tried new strategies in order to stop this narcotics network. The effectiveness of these interventions remains unknown, as very few studies have focused on them. The objective of the research is therefore to understand the impacts of non-traditionnal police operations on cryptomarket participants. Using data collected from various discussion forums focused on this distinct ecosystem and its community, we will study the effects of two recent police operations : the closure of the DeepDotWeb website, and Operation DisrupTor. The main results show that these interventions have shaken the commercial activities of the ecosystem and have affected the confidence of its community. Despite the increase in risk perception among many, members are not, however, discouraged, and try to find a way to circumvent the obstacles imposed by the police interventions, either by improving the infrastructure in place or by innovating toward new technological tools. However, the coping skills of the participants seem to have reached a certain limit, and their shortness of breath is noticeable.

This diploma thesis deals with the changes in civil engineering that occured as a result of the global pandemic crisis. The theoretical part defines the basic terms and definitions, describes facts from past crises and defines the economic situation before the pandemic. It compares the economic situation before and after the start of the pandemic. This thesis also examines the development of selected macroeconomic indicators during the crisis. The practical part consists of an analysis of the construction market using a questionnaire survey. Based on the data from this survey, it evaluates the view of participants in the construction market on the supply side. The final data obtained from the questionnaire survey are compared with statistical data. Finally, possible predictions about the development of civil engineering are defined.

Community college and higher education doctoral programs which prepare individuals for the two-year college administrative labor market were analyzed for regional orientation by studying the career experience of administrators, with earned doctorates in community college/ higher education, who were employed in 1990 by two-year colleges in the United States. Employment location relative to location of the doctoral-granting institution was considered at three points in time: three months prior to beginning doctoral study, three months after completing doctoral study, and the current (1990) employment. Contingency tables show strong regional orientation based on four US regions (North, South, Midwest, and West). The in-region association exists independently of in-state associations and may be found for two-year college administrators with both recent (five or less years since earning the doctorate) and for long-standing (fifteen or more years since earning the doctorate) doctoral degrees in community college or higher education. Analysis of individual institutions, however, shows variation in the extent of state, regional, and national orientation. Maps for the top ten doctoral-granting institutions (determined by total cumulative production of community college/higher education doctorates in the two-year college administrative labor market as of 1990) are presented for each of the three points in time. The range of in-state employment among these ten institutions is approximately 15% to 92% at pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and current (1990) employment locations. The range of in-region employment is narrower (approximately 48% to 100%). In addition, all states in which the individual held a postdoctoral administrative position of at least six months duration were cumulated and mapped by doctoral-granting institution. Two of these top ten institutions, Nova University and the University of Texas at Austin, show the pre- and post-doctoral locations of their community college/higher education doctorates dispersed in the largest number of states; while North Carolina State University, UCLA and University of Southern California have the fewest states reported. / Ed. D.