In this thesis I explore three topics in labour economics, using micro data from South Africa and Tanzania. South Africa suffers from extremely high income inequality, in part as a result of comprehensive Apartheid-era racial discrimination. The first topic explores possible explanations for the extremely large earnings differences across different types of employment for black South Africans, using the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study data. I analyse the relative importance of individual ability and institutions, including public sector wage setting and trade unions, in determining earnings. My results suggest that human capital explains much of the earnings differentials within the private sector, including union premiums, but cannot explain the large premiums for public sector workers. Self-employment is very common in urban Tanzania but, unlike South Africa, survey data show that there are large overlaps in the distribution of earnings in private wage employment and self-employment. This suggests that self-employment represents a viable alternative to wage employment in small, low productivity firms for the majority of urban Tanzanians. In chapter three I build an equilibrium search model of the urban Tanzanian labour market to explain the choice of wage and self-employment and the variation in earnings across and within these sectors. In the final topic I explore the effect of education on earnings in Tanzania. Estimating the returns to education has stimulated much recent work in applied econometrics as researchers advance their understanding of the effect of individual heterogeneity on the possibility of estimating the returns to education. In my attempt to purge estimates of the return to education of the influence of individual heterogeneity, I use an education reform in Tanzania as a natural experiment that provides exogenous variation in education. When using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) I find high and strongly convex, increasing returns to education. My best attempt at separating out the effect of individual heterogeneity suggests that returns are still high but that they may actually be concave.

Accounting for output per worker differences across countries has been an ongoing topic of research in economics. This thesis expands upon standard approaches by allowing for technological heterogeneity and exploiting firm and worker level data to determine the microeconomic sources of variation in both productivity and earnings. An intercontinental comparison using production functions for the Ghanaian and South Korean manufacturing sectors in Chapter 2 finds, in contrast to the conclusions of much of the macroeconomic literature, that there is no difference in total factor productivity (TFP). The microeconomic sources of the difference in value added per worker lie within the technology of firms, which is defined as the way in which inputs are used. Two important dimensions of this difference are the larger role of material inputs and the much lower rate of return to schooling in Ghana. In Chapter 3 a more general specification investigates intra-African variation in production, which is much smaller than the intercontinental difference. The pattern of cross-country heterogeneity is that, as GDP per capita rises, the relative input of materials falls, those of capital and labour rise and the returns to education increase. Differences in TFP are limited. Possible sources of the low returns to schooling in Ghana are investigated in Chapter 4 using earnings and production functions. Conditional upon selection into occupations, the only group of workers for whom education appreciably increases earnings are those employed in skilled jobs with more than ten years of education. The evidence is consistent with a lack of technological sophistication being the source of these low returns. Investment in new production processes by firms will increase the return to education and raise incomes and output. Reducing the share of intermediate inputs in production is key to the transition from low to high productivity activities. Technology is the critical element that can explain the performance of manufacturing firms across countries.

With the current strain on the world's material resources and the increase in their cost, a constant pressure is building to increase the productivity of human resources. Adding, to the strain is the increasing demand of society for a higher quality of life through more meaningful work. Responding to both of these pressures requires decisions that simultaneously meet the goals of organizations and the needs and values of employees. To make the kind of decisions demanded by this dual priority of human effectiveness and improved quality of life, information is needed to: 1. Improve understanding of the nature and scope of human resource expenditures; 2. Improve selection, retention, and motivation of employees; 3. Allocate money spent on human resources; 4. Overhaul the approach to communication among managers, between managers and other employees, and between the organization as a whole and outside parties; 5. Expand the scope of internal and external reports to deal with social as well as financial accomplishments. The ultimate objective of this research is to develop a human resource model and a heuristic for developing empirical support which can be useful to businessmen seeking to increase human effectiveness and improve the quality of life. The model merges several previously unrelated theories dealing with human resources and in the process contributes some new concepts.

This article assesses the empirical relationship between per capita income growth fluctuations and the age-structured human capital variations across four groups of geographically clustered developed and developing countries from spatial perspective. We estimate a spatial Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model of income dynamics where the distance between countries is defined on relational space based on their similarity in appropriation tendency of human capital in the production processes. These distances are computed using a newly developed human capital data set which fully characterizes the demographic structure of human capital, and thus underlines the joint relevance of demography and human capital in economic growth. Spatial effects on growth interdependence and complementarity are then explored with respect to the proposed distance metrics. Our results imply that significant cross-country growth interdependence based on human capital distances exists among defined country groups suggesting the need for a cooperative policy programme among them. We also find that the relationship between economic growth and human capital is highly nonlinear as a function of the proposed human capital distance.

This thesis aims to empirically examine the impact of investing in human capital development on organisational performance. It examines the relevant literature on human resource accounting and human capital development from different methodological strands and synthesises its findings in the development of a new theoretical framework. The literature review points out the challenges that remain to enterprises in quantifying and measuring the benefits of human capital development. The proposed framework takes into account those conceptual aspects of human resource accounting that how investment in human capital development can be measured to investigate the financial returns for organisations. The said framework also considers various contextual contingent factors that lead to a higher level of human resource sophistication and consequently which could affect the organisational performance. On the basis of relationships predicated between the key constructs of the theoretical model, a list of hypotheses is developed. The research methodology adopted by the researcher is based on the ideology of objectivism. It adopts a functionalist paradigm and a set of philosophical assumptions related to realism, positivism, determinism and nomotheticism. Its approach is deductive in terms of theory testing, employs the survey as its primary research strategy and uses mainly quantitative and partially qualitative methods of data collection. It adopts a cross-sectional time horizon and seeks to be exploratory and explanatory in nature. The main sample is comprised of 320 leading manufacturing organisations in Pakistan. A self-administered questionnaire is designed to collect data from human resource managers or individuals dealing with human resource development within the Pakistani manufacturing enterprises. SPSS-19 and SmartPLS packages are employed to analyse the quantitative data. Partial least squares method of structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is adopted for the testing of hypotheses. The study’s quantitative results provide an evidence of association between investment in the development of human capital and the benefits to organisations. Furthermore, organisations that invest in training and development programmes have high employee productivity which ultimately contributes towards high organisational performance. The qualitative results help in identifying the major problems faced by management of the Pakistani manufacturing organisation in evaluating investments in HCD and their impact on organisational performance. This research is a pioneer work in Pakistan and thereby contributes to the existing global literature on management accounting in general and on human resource accounting in particular.

The purpose of this study is to explore the important factors that affect graduate employment such as human capital, social capital and university career services. It focuses on the graduate labour market in the UK and uses mixed methods. While quantitative data derive from a survey, qualitative data come from interviews and secondary sources in a case study. The survey includes 947 university graduates and qualitative data consist of 8 interviews, internal and external reports. The findings show that the level of human capital and social capital affect the way graduates find a job and the use of social capital in job searches varies by ethnicity, age and academic level. However, gender and academic discipline do not affect the use of social capital in the UK graduate labour market. Moreover, the study shows that university career services can play an important role in job searches. Overall, however, direct application and online career services are two most widely used methods to find a job. The originality of the research is twofold. Firstly, it illustrates the relationship between two important components in graduates’ job search processes: human capital and social capital. Secondly, it examines the role of an institution: university career services and displays the importance of institutional approaches in building a bridge between students and employers.

Aborder le thème de l’attractivité des investissements directs étrangers (IDE) relève d’une préoccupation essentielle pour la Tunisie. Depuis les années 1970, les IDE sont devenus un vecteur clef dans la croissance du pays, en témoignent les différentes mesures législatives et réglementaires qui ont été prises afin de préparer un cadre attractif pour les investisseurs. Cependant, au regard des efforts consentis et des avantages accordés, les résultats sont plutôt décevants et restent loin des attentes. Dés lors, il est intéressant d’étudier les déterminants des IDE en Tunisie et leurs effets sur l’économie locale en particulier sur la croissance économique. A cette fin le capital humain est mis au cœur du mécanisme en analysant son impact sur la croissance et la manière dont il interagit avec les flux d’IDE. C’est autour de cette thématique que notre thèse est axée. L’analyse statistique et économétrique menée au cours de ce travail montre que durant les deux dernières décennies, les IDE en Tunisie s’expliquent par la réalisation des projets ponctuels de prospections pétrolières et des opérations de privatisation de grandes entreprises publiques. Ce sont principalement les secteurs rentiers (hydrocarbures) et les opérations non reconductibles de privatisation qui ont attiré le plus d’IDE, alors que les IDE manufacturiers restent toujours polarisés par le textile et l’habillement. Il apparaît aussi, que l’IDE, hors énergie et privatisations, est faible. De plus, ces opérations n’ont pas déclenché une dynamique d’entrée d’IDE dans ces secteurs. Pour conclure, les résultats attestent clairement de l’effet peu significatif de l’évolution des flux d’IDE et des taux de scolarisation (capital humain) sur la croissance économique en Tunisie. Il ressort aussi que les IDE pris isolément affectent positivement la croissance mais sans crée autant des externalités positives (effets spillovers). / Addressing the issue of the attractiveness of foreign direct investment is a major concern for countries like Tunisia. Since the 1970s, the attractiveness of FDI became a key variable in the country’s economic growth, as shown by the adoption of different legislative and regulatory measures meant to create a favorable environment for investors. However, given the amount of efforts invested and benefits granted, the results come across as being pretty disappointing and all remain far from the goals and hopes initially raised. In this context, it is interesting to study the FDI determinants in Tunisia and their impact on the local economy especially in terms of national growth. To this end, we will focus on the important role played by the human capital, its effects on growth and the way it interacts with the flows of FDI. The core of the thesis will indeed revolve around this theme. The statistical and econometric analysis undertaken in the dissertation will show that for the past two decades, FDI in Tunisia have been the result of a few oil exploration projects and privatization of big public companies. It is mainly the annuitant sector (hydrocarbon) and the non-renewable privatization projects that have attracted the most FDI, whereas industrial FDI remain polarized by the textile-Apparel industries. It also appears that, privatizations and energy sector set aside, FDI remain weak. Not only that, these operations have not triggered a dynamic input on FDI for these sectors. In conclusion, the results clearly prove that progress in FDI and school enrollment ratio (human capital) in Tunisia has had little effect on the Tunisian economic growth. It also has been brought to our attention that, taken alone, FDI have a positive impact on growth; however they fail to create spillover effects.

Depuis la crise de stagflation des années 1970 et la chute du mur de Berlin à la fin des années 1980, le néolibéralisme s'érige comme un paradigme idéologique et hégémonique de développement à l'échelle planétaire. Ce contexte international et les facteurs internes ont poussé le gouvernement Mozambicain à abandonner, au milieu des années 1980, le socialisme et à adopter les principes néolibéraux. Cette thèse cherche à identifier, à analyser et à expliquer les effets et les implications de l'adoption des principes néolibéraux sur la sélection et l'organisation des curricula et savoirs scolaires au Mozambique. / Since the stagflation crisis in the 1970's and the fall of the Berlin's Wall at the end of the 1980's, Neo-liberalism has become an ideological and hegemonic paradigm of development worldwide. This international context and the internal factors have led the Mozambican government to abandon, in the midst of the 1980's, socialism and to adopt neoliberal principles. This thesis seeks to identify, analyze and explain the effects and implications of the adoption of neoliberal principles on the selection and structuring of school curriculum and knowledge in Mozambique.

Our goal is the estimation of country - level production function aimed at understanding the role of human capital. We analyze the effect of education, especially the effect of the share of college graduates in prime-age population (between 25 - 54 years) on the European Union (EU) countries' labor productivity. Here, an important issue is efficiency of tertiary education institutions. We split the ratio of human capital to observe it from different aspects. We compare an effect of lower and upper tertiary educated, by specializations and by gender. The relationship between human capital and labor productivity was found positive though not significant or significant only on 10 % confidence level. The influence of human capital on labor productivity was found very low, in some cases even negative. Assuming that one of the main reasons behind these contra-intuitive results is the problem of unobserved heterogeneity, we also run instrumental variable estimation. We found positive and significant on 5 % confidence level relationship between human capital and labor productivity. The influence of larger share of tertiary educated people on labor productivity is more evident after some period of time, in our example after two years. Keywords: human capital, labor productivity, European Union, production...

This thesis is devoted to the development of employees in the organization, their motivation to further self-education and formulation of recommendations aimed at the relevsnt use of stimulative and motivational elements. Attention will be paid to the leadership style of managers as a factor of employee's motivation whatsoever for its further development responsibility. Subject to examination and the objective of the work is to evaluate the role of leadership style in the education process in the organization and add the existing knowledge with the relationship between leadership styles and motivation to actively participate in the acquisition and diffusion of knowledge and skills. With the research survey, questionnaire and interviews is made an analysis on the motivation of employees in specific organizations and evaluation of factors that have a major impact on employees motivation to their further developement. This thesis takes the form of empirical study. Key words: Motivation, Leadership, Self-development