Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / Over the past years, Zimbabwe has witnessed enormous amounts of economic challenges which have forced many to migrate out of the country in search of better living conditions and employment. The money and goods sent by migrant workers to their families have become very important in alleviating poverty in Zimbabwean households. However, there are a few studies that have been conducted at a household level to explore the role of remittances in alleviating poverty in Zimbabwe. This research examines the role that remittances play in alleviating poverty at a household level in Zimbabwe by using a case study of Epworth remittance-receiving households in Zimbabwe. The main objective of this research is to explore how the remittances sent to the poor households increase their income level and human capital in order to reduce their poverty level. The research mainly focuses on the New Economics of Labour Migration Theory (NELM) to understand the meaning of international migration and its link to remittances. A qualitative research method was used to provide experiences of the households who receive remittances. The information was collected through one on one interviews which were conducted in Epworth to 14 participants who received remittances and one focus group discussion with 6 participants. The study found out that majority of households in Epworth that receive remittances depend solely on the money sent to them by their loved ones, which help them meet their basic needs such as food, clothes and proper sanitation. The qualitative data analysis also showed that the remittances sent to the families increase human capital through the payment of school and hospital fees. However, the participants that were interviewed highlighted that they faced challenges of accessing cash remittances, especially through formal channels. It was established that the majority of households prefer using informal channels to receive their cash because of the presence of long queues at the banks and shortage of hard cash. Policymakers in Zimbabwe need to come up with strategies that will allow easy access to remittances and also encourage migrants to use formal channels which are safe and accountable.

Magister Commercii - MCom / Although South Africa has made progress in the last decade with regard to political transition, the economic landscape still carries the element of social stratification. This is evident from the continued widening of income distribution. There still remains a continued backlog that can only be addressed through social investment in education.

The nexus among foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and the Mexican economic growth has been the subject of a number of recent papers. Yet, previous studies frequently overlook its relationship to human capital and consequently ignore potential interlinkages between the variables. By running an ARDL model and thereafter applying the Granger causality technique derived by Toda and Yamamoto (1995) and Dolado and Lütkepohl (1996) this paper investigates the relationship among FDI and economic performance in Mexico during 1970-2018 after incorporating human capital into the framework. When including human capital, measured as gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education, FDI inflows and real GDP per capita have an insignificant long-run relationship. However, this paper finds a Granger-causal relationship running from FDI inflows to human capital. Human capital, on the other hand, precedes real GDP per capita and the main implication is thus that FDI may not spur economic performance directly, but indirectly through its significant effect on the enrolment ratio in tertiary education. Therefore, to ignore the influence of human capital may result in deceptive conclusions regarding the Mexican FDI-growth nexus.

Knowledge workers are an important resource for the typical modern business firm, yet financial reporting ignores such resources. Some researchers contend that the accounting profession has stressed reliability in order to make the accounting appear objective. Others concur, noting that accounting is an insecure profession and adopts strict rules when faced with uncertainty. Accountants have promulgated a strict rule to expense human resource costs, although many know that such resources have future benefits. Some researchers suggest that any discipline must modify its language in order to initiate change toward providing useful social ameliorations. If accounting theorists extend this idea to the accounting lexicon.s description of investments in human resources, investors and other accounting user groups might gain greater insight into how a firm fosters and nourishes human capital. I tested three hypotheses related to this issue by administering an experiment designed to assess financial analysts. perceptions about alternative financial statement treatments of human resources in an investment recommendation task. I predicted that (1) analysts' perceptions of the reliability (relevance) of the information they received would decrease (increase) as the treatment of human resources increasingly violated GAAP (became more current-oriented), (2) analysts exposed to alternative accounting treatments would report a lower likelihood of recommending that their clients invest in the company in the task, and (3) financial analysts who ranked reliability (relevance) as a more important information quality would be less (more) likely to recommend that their clients buy the stock represented in the case because the treatment of human resources on the financial statements violated GAAP (was more current-oriented) as compared to analysts who ranked reliability (relevance) as being lower (higher) in importance. Analysts receiving financial statements with accounting treatments of human resource costs that violated GAAP judged such information as less reliable and were also less likely to recommend that their clients buy the stock in the task than analysts receiving financial statements that conformed to GAAP. Also, analysts who perceived reliability as a more important information quality reacted more negatively to a replacement cost approach to accounting for human resources than participants who perceived reliability as being less important. A potential confounding explanation of the results is the varied language used in the audit opinions included with the treatment financial statements. Whether explained by the audit opinion language or the actual differences contained in the financial statements, the results suggest that an important user group, financial analysts, may be subject to the aura of objectivity suggested by Porter in 1995.

Education drives labour market outcomes and social mobility. When educational attainment is influenced by socioeconomic factors, many students from disadvantaged backgrounds are left behind. This is undesirable as it greatly reduces the human capital that could have been present in the national economy, therefore affecting the potential of economic growth. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the impact of a policy that has the purpose of reducing the gap in educational attainment between disadvantaged students and their peers.  The analysis takes place over a 12 year time span and across 22 local authority areas in Wales. The results highlight the importance in the measure of the attainment gap. The implementation of Pupil Premium can be correlated with a reduction in the gap that is defined by the proportional difference between disadvantaged students and their peers. The magnitude of the attainment gap has stayed fairly constant but overall attainment has risen significantly over the period under analysis.  There is room for further study into the possibility that the impact of Pupil Premium has affected some groups of students more than others.

With the recent influx of foreign-born individuals migrating to Sweden, this study aims to answer the question, “do high skilled foreign-born individuals relate positively to average wages in Sweden?”. We specifically observe high skilled foreign-born individuals and their contribution to the average wage across different municipalities in Sweden between the years 2011 and 2018. The method carried out in this study consisted of an empirical analysis where the significance of economic factors was interpreted in order to understand the variation in wages. The data was extracted from Statistics Sweden. The relationship of the share of highly educated foreign-born individuals has proved to be insignificant with respect to average wages in Sweden. Different theories are discussed in this paper in order to identify the key labour market outcomes due to the labour supply shock. Our findings disclose that differences in wages are present, meaning that natives and foreign-born individuals are complements in the short run

This master thesis in Economic History explores the human capital transfer embodied in Swedish emigrants migrating to North America, during the period 1860-1923. Previous research on this topic has mainly focused on the second and third generation of Swedish-Americans, but the focus of this paper is on the first generation. The results indicates a high level of human capital transfer for the whole period, but increasing sharply after 1900. The thesis evaluates two different models for signaling human capital transfer, one based on social mobility, and the other on emigration motive. By considering migration motive it has been possible to use source material collected at a single point in time, before emigration taking place, but still knowing that these migrants were moving. The concept of informal human capital extends the analysis and makes it possible to use more source material compared to a situation with only formal human capital.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the problem that the companies do not use the potential of their employees on innovations and intrapreneurial processes. The source of innovation is usually the entrepreneur. These are individuals that come up with new ideas of what the market is likely to want or desire. These people have usually gathered this knowledge through interaction with consumers. Sometimes it is the imaginative impulsive desire on their part to offer something new or different, at other times it is an improvement on previous knowledge. However in a corporate or large organisation environment it is often the employees who come up with innovative ideas because of their close contacts with consumers of the product or service of the company. They are very close to the ground realities and can be a great source of finding out the consumer desires or preferences. Although they are employees, they have the entrepreneurial spirit to understand the need of urge to meet the expectations. This gives them the same satisfaction an entrepreneur would feel on the success and acceptance of his innovative idea. Therefore being innovative is not the sole domain of the leaders, corporate or individual. The potential of the workers and employees remains unexploited in this direction. This study will try to find out the importance of the mental force of the employee on the survival of the company in this competitive world, from the perspective of innovation and intrapreneurship. / QC 20100708

La presente tesis tiene como objetivo medir la contribución del capital humano al crecimiento económico del Perú durante el periodo 1970-2018. Desde el punto de vista teórico, autores como Uzawa (1965), Romer (1986) y Lucas (1988) nos dicen que existe una relación positiva entre el capital humano y el crecimiento económico. No obstante, mediante la metodología de Engle y Granger (1987) el presente estudio muestra que dicha relación no se cumple para el caso peruano. Este resultado es atribuible a factores como la baja productividad del trabajador, la baja calidad educativa, la pobre infraestructura educativa, la baja inversión educativa, entre otros. / This thesis aims to measure the contribution of human capital to the economic growth of Peru during the period 1970-2018. From the theoretical point of view, authors such as Uzawa (1965), Romer (1986) and Lucas (1988) tell us that there is a positive relationship between human capital and economic growth. However, through the methodology of Engle and Granger (1987) the present study shows that this relationship is not fulfilled for the Peruvian case. This result is attributable to factors such as low worker productivity, low educational quality, poor educational infrastructure, low educational investment, among others. / Tesis

This paper analyzes the immigrant´s probability to participate in social assistance programs compared to natives in Finland and if there are any cohort and assimilation effects. For estimation, we used the linear probability model to find out the result. The results show that in general there is no assimilation effect on immigrants but there is a sign of assimilation when variables such as regions, education level and refugee are added to the model. The result shows that immigrants have a higher possibility of the participation rate in social assistance compared to natives and the probability differs between refugees and non-refugees and country of origin. The result shows a higher probability for immigrants from the Middle east. In this paper language skill (Finnish variable) is included and it shows that the possibility reduces if the immigrants have a higher capacity of Finnish language.