M.A. / The purpose of this study is to examine structural unemployment in the post apartheid South Africa and propose possible policy options to reduce structural unemployment in the new South Africa. In coming to some possible solutions, it is necessary to consider the South African labour market before and after the elections in 1994 when the Apartheid struggle was ended in a formal and legitimate manner. It is also necessary to research the dilemma of structural unemployment in South Africa and search for possible solutions to the problem by looking at current government policy and other views from the different stakeholders in the economy. It is only through this process that one can start coming to some kind of conclusion as to possible measures to reduce structural unemployment in the post-Apartheid South Africa. This study should by no means be considered as the answer to the problem of unemployment in South Africa, but only acts as an introductory study into the problem of rising structural unemployment in the country.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / Youth today are constantly faced with enormous challenges and are continually faced with job uncertainty and scarce opportunities with almost no means to personal growth. Faced with bleak future livelihood prospects, youth make up a large number of the world’s working poor. Inadequate youth education and lack of labour market preparation still pose challenges for South African youth. They face sizeable constraints to entrepreneurship such as a lack of entrepreneurship culture; lack of entrepreneurship knowledge through formal and informal education; relevant business development services, unsatisfactory business support and insufficient access to financing. Despite this, the extent of research on youth entrepreneurship in Africa is deficient, even non-existent in some contexts. In response to the alarming rate of youth unemployment, the South African government had embarked on realising some of the aspects of the National Youth Policy through youth empowerment via a number of interventions. The implementing agency of all youth development policies and interventions is the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA). The agency has rolled out a number of interventions to address various issues pertinent to the state of the youth in South Africa. However, the specific interventions this study addresses are those related to entrepreneurship, specifically the NYDA Grant programme. Under the Grant programme, a number of issues are addressed such as provision of physical capital, access to resources in the form of advice, guidance and mentorship made available by the National Youth Development Agency to the unemployed youth in the Western Cape. While many youth development programmes have been rolled out both around the world and in South Africa, very little monitoring and evaluation has been conducted in identifying which programmes are effective and sustainable in the long run. At the time of this research, limited information had been accessible with respect to the benefits of entrepreneurship development programmes in South Africa. This research is significant in the sense that it bridges the gaps in the literature on youth entrepreneurship interventions and practical interventions in the field. Furthermore, it provides a lens with which to determine whether they are indeed a sustainable way forward for unemployed youth. Therefore this study conducted a process evaluation using qualitative research methods in order to ascertain if the NYDA is efficiently and effectively executing its mandate with respect to the Grant programme. The research objectives of this study were 1) to conduct a process evaluation of the National Youth Development Agency’s Grant programme, 2) to develop a theoretical and legislative framework underpinning youth in South Africa, 3) to describe and analyse the NYDA’s Grant programme, 4) to highlight the opportunities and challenges that affect the current implementation of the Grant programme and 5) to present recommendations. The findings suggest that the Grant programme has been relevant, timely and useful to young aspiring entrepreneurs providing them with the necessary support through the provision of stock, physical capital and other business support services such as mandatory entrepreneurial training. Despite this, young entrepreneurs still face challenges in sustaining their businesses financially and struggle with establishing a physical space in which they can trade. A number of recommendations were made from the perspectives of the beneficiaries and the NYDA Cape Town Branch implementing staff, namely: increasing staff to improve the administration of the Grant Programme, increasing the grant turnaround time, providing recourse to further funding and physical space and uploading the grant application process onto the internet to save time and money for both beneficiaries and implementing staff.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

This thesis assesses the efficiency wage hypothesis using Australian industry and macro economic time series data by focussing on two questions: whether paying an above market clearing wage called the efficiency wage raises industry output and productivity, and if such a payment causes unemployment at the macro economic level. The wageproductivity or wage-output nexus is investigated using three techniques; namely a decomposition procedure used by Huang, Halam, Orazem, and Paterno (1998), an instrumental variable estimation method, and the Solow residuals approach. Further, an examination of macro economic unemployment involves developing an aggregate unemployment equation, where the Solow (1979) model is used to derive a testable hypothesis. The Solow model argues that effort, which is a function of the wage, enters the production function when the real wage is rigid. By introducing profit maximising behaviour and making further economic assumptions, the Solow condition that the effort elasticity with respect to the wage is one can be derived. The theoretical framework of Solow is useful as specifying a production function allows the possibility of aggregate data being used to assess the wage-productivity prediction. The Solow condition is also useful because it provides the basis for constructing a testable hypothesis using an unemployment equation. Solow???s theoretical framework and the Solow condition does not rely on the economic assumptions of the shirking, labour turnover, sociological and adverse selection [micro economic] efficiency wage models. Therefore, the innovation of this thesis is to treat the efficiency wage hypothesis as an imperfectly competitive model of the labour market using applied macro economic methods. Previous Australian macro economic literature in the 1970s and 1980s have argued that the wage is either harmful to employment prospects (ie unemployment is classical), or that factors such as consumption and investment are more important (ie unemployment is Keynesian). One of the aims of the thesis is to use the empirical analysis to suggest that neither of these propositions is entirely correct. Rather, an intermediate position is arrived at by arguing that there is some empirical evidence in Australian industry and macro economic time series data to suggest that the wage plays a dual function: both as a small source of productivity and also a minor cause of involuntary unemployment.

This essay examines the public debate concerning the unemployment of Sweden just before the general election 2005. Its main purpose is to analyse what lies behind the huge differences in statistics, as presented by the two leading factions in the debate. It concludes that these differences are foremost a problem of semantics, and that although the two factions have statistical proof of their claims, it is their use of terminology that is in fact their main weapon in the debate.The key word here is the swedish word for employment – sysselsättning – which the two facitons use in entirely different ways, creating a lot of possabilities for interpretation. This has caused a type of debate which is actually about the reinterpretation this word, and those who are to be included in the statistics as being “sysselsatt”, therefore, it is semantics that affects the number of unemployed people in the statistics.

No description available.

Sectoral shifts of labor demand can have significant effects on aggregate rate and duration of unemployment, and this is known as sectoral shifts hypothesis. To mea¬sure the sectoral shifts, past studies use David M. Lilien’s dispersion measure which represents the effect of the changes in the distribution of sectoral shocks on aggregate rates of layoffs. This dissertation proposes an improved measure of sectoral shifts and tests the sectoral shifts hypothesis. It shows that, when the distribution of sectoral shocks is asymmetric, dispersion alone is not sufficient to capture the effect of the changes in distribution and, the skewness of the distribution can have a significant role in the approximation of aggregate rates of layoffs. Empirical results show a sig¬nificant effect of the skewness measure on the aggregate rate of unemployment. The results also lend a strong support for the sectoral shifts hypothesis in Lilien type and Abraham-Katz type models, which contrasts with the rejection of the hypothesis in previous studies of the Abraham-Katz type models. One concern about these empirical results is that the classical measures of disper¬sion and skewness are very sensitive to the presence of outliers and consequently the test of the hypothesis can be distorted by this presence. Strong evidence exists for the presence of outliers in the distribution of estimated sectoral shocks. Various robust measures of dispersion and skewness are computed. The sectoral shifts hypothesis is still strongly supported when the robust measures are used. This reinforces the empirical findings under the classical measures. When the mobility of workers across sectors is limited because of frictions in the labor market, workers who become unemployed due to sectoral shifts of labor demand will experience a longer duration of unemployment because of the time associated with switching sectors. Therefore, for a given rate of unemployment, a higher proportion of these workers will increase the average duration of unemployment. Empirical results show that sectoral shifts have a statistically greater effect on the average duration of unemployment than cyclical fluctuations. Sectoral shifts help explain unusual upward trends in the duration of unemployment in the 1990s.

Abstract Since 2008, the overall unemployment rate has been rising sharply, and the overall unemployment and economic problems have gradually emerged. The unemployment rate in areas of Kaohsiung City, Kaohsiung County, and Pingtung County is higher than the standard of the whole Taiwan area, and the industrial development in areas of Kaohsiung City, Kaohsiung County, and Pingtung County starts to change. Under this circumstance, enterprises and unemployed persons attach more importance to Taiwan government's vocational training policies. Vocational training has always been the government's main long-term human resources policy. Therefore, this study is trying to discuss how to cultivate the manpower needed by enterprises and promote unemployed persons to re-enter the job market through vocational training, promote the overall social stability and activate economy, and probe into the pre-service training items for public vocational training in order to attain the goals and purposes of vocational training. Employment security is one of the major policies of Taiwan government, and vocational training and employment services are the greatest demands for people toward employment security. Although the policy goals of vocational training are quite clear, the actual practice still leaves room for improvement. The contents of this study include: analysis of difficulties encountered by people in areas of Kaohsiung City, Kaohsiung County, and Pingtung County; planning for vocational training courses administered by the government; and direction of enterprises¡¦ demand for talents. This study clarifies the demands of the existing enterprises and people for professional vocational training from the angle of the needs of enterprises, market and unemployed persons, as well as supply differences, and further submits concrete suggestions for improving employment ability and meeting the needs of enterprises for talents. From this study, it is found that there is a gap between enterprises¡¦ demand for manpower and the existing vocational training items. Consequently, the employment ability of the unemployed people can¡¦t be solved effectively. The main factor lies in the fact that the vocational training units fail to control complete and sufficient information about the job market. So, the vocational training units are suggested to understand the talent gap of enterprises first before they develop vocational training courses as the pre-service training projects for unemployed persons in the future, so as to create a win-win-win situation for enterprises, unemployed persons, and vocational training units. Keywords¡Gunemployment rate, vocational training

This dissertation contains two themes. The first involves the relationship between economic uncertainty and employment/unemployment determination, the second involves the institution of firing costs, in particular its effect on employment over the business cycle. Chapter 2 introduces uncertainty about labour productivity into the dynamic turnover-training model of Hoon and Phelps (1992). This makes hiring an investment under uncertainty. I get an explicit solution for the Bellman equation for the representative firm's optimization problem and find the optimal path for employment at the industry level. It is shown that an increase in the level of uncertainty reduces the shadow price of employees, the hire rate and optimal wage, and shifts the path for industry employment to a lower level. Chapter 3 then moves on to test the hypothesis using both data for all the OECD countries and also panel data for British industries. I find that those industries which have experienced the most volatility - measured by their average share prices - also have had the slowest employment growth, other things equal. Similarly, epochs of high uncertainty, measured by inflation and exchange rate movements, have accompanied low job creation in the OECD countries. The policy implication is that predictable economic policies and stability may reduce the equilibrium rate of unemployment. Chapter 4 looks at the determinants of the effectiveness of the institution of statutory firing costs. In the past, measures of firing restrictions have only included the size of the redundancy payments. I show that this is seriously inadequate. Thus the effectiveness of firing restrictions depends on the persistence of shocks to labour demand, the rate of interest, the rate at which workers quit, the degree of uncertainty about future productivity and economic growth. The implication is that a given level of redundancy payments may either have a very large or a very small effect on the number of redundancies, depending on the economic environment.

On August 7th, 1960, in less than a year from now, it will be twenty years since an unemployment insurance scheme was started in Canada. It is perhaps appropriate at this time to review the development of the scheme,and evaluate its impact on the Canadian economy. [...]