Human Capital

Since the DCMS Creative Industries Mapping Document highlighted the key role played by creative activities in the UK economy and society, the creative industries agenda has expanded across Europe and internationally. It has the support of local authorities, regional development agencies, research councils, arts and cultural agencies and other sector organisations. Within this framework, higher education institutions have also engaged in the creative agenda but have struggled to define their role in this growing sphere of activities. Higher Education and the Creative Economy critically engages with the complex interconnections between higher education, geography, cultural policy and the creative economy. This book is organised into four sections which articulate the range of dynamics that can emerge between higher education and the creative economy: partnership and collaboration across higher education institutions and the creative and cultural industries; the development of creative human capital; connections between arts schools and local art scenes; and links with broader policy directions and work. While it has a strong UK component, it also includes international perspectives, specifically from Australia, Singapore, Europe and the USA. This authoritative collection challenges the boundaries of creative and cultural industry development by bringing together international experts from a range of subject areas, presenting researchers with a unique multidisciplinary approach to the topic. This edited collection will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers working in the area of creative and cultural industries development.

The purpose of this article is to investigate major determinants of participation in adult education. Specifically, a direct measure of literacy skills available in the International Adult Literacy Survey is included. Interpreted as a measure of human capital, it is expected that literacy skills are at least as important a predictor of participation in adult education and training as educational attainment. The findings however do not support this expectation. Instead educational attainment remains the most important factor predicting participation in adult education and training. The models in this article are based on the idea that readiness to learn is formed early in life and further developed through educational and work experiences. Factors that are hypothesised to influence participation in adult education and training are separated into factors associated with the long arm of the family and the long arm of the job. The findings indicate the long arm of the family plays an important role, which supports early intervention, especially during the formal schooling years. The results also highlight the strong link between the use of literacy skills at work and participation in adult education and training. r

Previous empirical studies confirm that intellectual capital has a significant and substantive impact on performance. The purpose of this research is to examine the inter-relationships and interactions among intellectual capital components and business performance in the Portuguese banking industry. The concept of relational capital was extended to include 'stakeholder orientation' items. Model development and hypothesis testing was conducted using PLS on a sample of 253 respondents from 53 organisations. Results show a confirmation of previous studies as it relates to hypothesis testing but a difference in psychometric item evaluation given the unique geographical and sectoral context. Recommendations are then made for researchers and practitioners.

Mountain guides are one of the front-line players in the tourism industry.
Through their professionalism, they can alter the tourists' vacation from a tour into an experience. This study examines the mountain guiding in Indonesia by comparing the Indonesian mountain guide training and certification programme and to what degree the approach and content correspond with the UIMLA and the IFMGA programmes. This research uses a dual approach to investigating the issues: a content analysis of APGI 3, UIMLA and IFMGA programmes respectively and interviews with various players involved in mountain guide training and certification. It was discovered insufficient training, lack of professionalism and ineffective monitoring measures. Although professional certification is a widely accepted paradigm and embodied in legislation from global to local levels, implementation continues to be a challenge. As a minimum, it is necessary for Indonesia’s tourism business to improve the training programme and this can be done through less government interference and delegate the authority to the specialised mountain guide organisations like APGI. However, very few studies about mountain guide training and certification and mountain guiding as a profession have been introduced, and this study represents one of the first attempts to do so. The results of this research can be used for improving mountain guiding in Indonesia.
Keywords: mountain guide; training and certification programmes;
Indonesia; professionalism, APGI; IFMGA; UIMLA

Theory at both the micro and macro level predicts that investments in superior human capital generate better firm-level performance. However, human capital takes time and money to develop or acquire, which potentially offsets its positive benefits. Indeed, extant tests appear equivocal regarding its impact. To clarify what is known, we meta-analyzed effects drawn from 66 studies of the human capital-firm performance relationship and investigated 3 moderators suggested by resource-based theory. We found that human capital relates strongly to performance, especially when the human capital in question is not readily tradable in labor markets and when researchers use operational performance measures that are not subject to profit appropriation. Our results suggest that managers should invest in programs that increase and retain firm-specific human capital.

This thesis consists of three empirical studies in economics of education on the determinants and consequences of language-in-education (LiE) policies. The “Environmental settings – Inputs – Processes – Immediate outcomes – Long-term outcomes” (EIPOL) evaluation model is applied to LiE policies and programs and serves as the overall framework of this research (see Introductory Chapter). Each study then targets at least one stage of the EIPOL framework to test the validity of the “green” vs. “free-market” linguistic theories. Whereas the two first studies derive models tested empirically in the African context, the third is tested on a sample of countries from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). The first study, Rationales to Language-in-Education Policies in Postcolonial Africa: Towards a Holistic Approach, considers two issues. First, it explores the factors affecting the choice of an LiE policy in 35 African countries. The results show that the countries adopting a uni...

iii iii SEKAPUR SIRIH Sewindu menapak, mencoba memberi dampak. Sejak awal Universitas ini dibangun, usaha selalu dilakukan untuk mengedepankan isu-isu aktual yang merangkum lima rumpun unggulan pengembangan perkotaan dan gaya hidup perkotaan di Universitas Pembangunan Jaya (UPJ).

Bu kitap; duygusal ve davranışsal bozukluklara sahip öğrenciler hakkında bilgi sahibi olmak isteyen sınıf öğretmenleri, özel eğitim öğretmenleri ve alanda çalışan uzmanlar için hazırlanmış giriş niteliğinde bir uygulama kitabıdır. Her bir bozukluğun nedeni, tanımlanması, güncel araştırmalar ışığında verilmeye çalışılmış ve okul ortamındaki pratik uygulamalarla da anlatım zenginleştirilmiştir. Bunlara ek olarak belirli bir bozukluğun tüm yönlerine ilişkin temel yaklaşımla birlikte bilimsel olarak geliştirilmiş müdahele yöntemleri de verilmeye çalışılmıştır.

Bu kitabın alanda yeni çalışmaya başlayan öğretmenler kadar güncel verilerle desteklenen tanı koyma ve müdahele stratejilrine önem vermesi nedeniyle alanda uzun süredir çalışmakta olan öğretmenlere ve uzmanlara da yararlı olacağını düşünmekteyiz.

En Chile, salvo los niveles de inversión de políticas públicas se desconocen las características de quienes acceden a capacitación. Este artículo tiene como objetivo examinar las variables demográficas, sociales y laborales que inciden en el acceso a capacitación, como también proponer un modelo empírico que permita diferenciar las características principales de los capacitandos y crear sus perfiles. Para esto, se realiza un análisis a través de la Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica (CASEN) del año 2009 y los datos entregados por el informe técnico desarrollado por el Servicio Nacional de Capacitación y Empleo (SENCE) del mismo año. Se demuestra que los predictores de mayor relevancia son la categoría ocupacional y los niveles de educación formal. Se discuten las implicancias de los resultados para las políticas públicas.

This article deals with the role of community-based ecotourism for strengthening human and social capitals as well as for enhancing culture and forest livelihood of riverbank dwellers in the Tapajós region, in central Amazonia. The research was done based on the premise that ecotourism can be a potential avenue for putting in evidence local culture, identity and singular lifestyles as while it can contribute to strengthen the local networks which can result in collective material and immaterial advantages. The analysis examines the hypothesis that outsiders (the tourists) once they travel to and stay with local communities, they become the primary agents who are in a position to perceive the main aspects of values, beliefs and routines as particularities of an Amazonian livelihood. Even though the visitors usually stay a few days in a certain community, they end up paying enough attention to what the locals tell and do. This way, the tourists involuntarily put the locals at the centre of their visit, to the extent the locals start realizing how important their forest lifestyle is. This argument certainly does not aim at validating the "spetacularisation" of forest people, of their environment and of their culture. Instead, the authors are rather interested in the processes through which outsiders can direct or indirectly-as ecotourism participants-contribute to improve the quality of life and to raise self-esteem of riverbank dwellers. Some Amazonian peoples (of remote areas) usually have a feeling of periphery and of marginalization, because they do not take part in the 'developed metropolitan world'. The self-esteem factor gets relevance in an academic debate, because the Amazonian peoples hold a feeling of being periphery and marginal in reason of not being part of a 'developed metropolitan world'; and this may cause adverse effects on their attitude and expectations. The investigation has a qualitative approach in order to produce descriptive data. Open and semi-structured interviews and participant observation were the main methods used for getting information from the riverbank dwellers.

Social programmes in Peru have been plagued historically by a culture of dependency, clientelism and corruption. Juntos, a conditional cash transfer programme targeting children under the age of 14, was initiated in 2005 to provide a new model for social protection provision and tackle the country's widespread childhood poverty. Its design largely follows that of counterpart Latin American programmes and seeks to address the risks to children's future human capital development that stem from inadequate access to basic services and various forms of social exclusion. An innovative dimension of Juntos is its explicit focus on populations most affected by the country's political violence during the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on document analysis and qualitative fi eld research, this independent assessment considers the impacts of the programme on childhood poverty, the strengths and weaknesses of a conditional approach, and changes in intra-household and community dynamics as well as state-citizen relations. It concludes by discussing policy challenges and directions for future research.

Most of the human capital literature pertaining to developing countries focuses on the returns to education in either farm work or wage work; few studies examine how education affects the allocation of time between these activities. This paper estimates the returns to education in farm and off-farm work, and consequently the role of education in determining the allocation of labor. The results from this study show that off-farm work has a much higher return to education than does farm work and suggest that this divergence in returns affects the allocation of labor in farm households between farm and off-farm work.

This paper estimates the returns to career decisions in the marriage market and the returns to marital choices in the labor market. Theoretically, investments in the labor market could affect the chances of receiving a marriage offer, the type of offer, and the probability of getting divorced. Also, marital status could affect one's outcomes in the labor market, most notably the "marriage premium" in wages. To untangle this simultaneous decision-making process, I develop a dynamic programming model of the joint career and marital decisions of young men between the ages of 16 and 39. The results show that labor market decisions are strongly inßuenced by their returns in the marriage market. If there were no returns to career choices in the marriage market, men would tend to work less, study less, and choose blue-collar jobs over white-collar jobs. These results suggest that the existing literature underestimates the true returns to human capital investments by ignoring their returns in the marriage market. In addition, the results show that the "marriage premium" is much lower than traditional OLS estimates, and is virtually non-existent for higher wage men. This result suggests that while marriage may make low wage men more serious about their careers, marriage has little effect on high wage men who are already highly motivated.

An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the CESifo website: www.CESifo.de * We would like to thank Mikael Lindahl and Daniele Checchi for sharing their datasets. We are also grateful to Robert Shimer, Giorgio Primiceri and Alan Krueger for helpful comments. EDUCATION, GROWTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY Coen Teulings Thijs van Rens* CESifo Working Paper No. 653 (4)

The issues of consumer rights and consumer welfare are increasingly important, especially in the current economic climate in which the ability to make informed choices represents a real advantage in consumers’ daily life. In order to make their purchases with confidence, both in their country and abroad, consumers need easy access to precise information and to professional advice. Taking into account the fact that education and training are a strategic factor for a sustainable development through contribution to human capital development, within the Romania–Bulgaria Cross-Border Cooperation Program 2007–2013, the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Romania and the D. Tsenov Academy of Economics in Svisthov, Bulgaria decided to collaborate in the field “Cooperation on human resources development – joint development of skills and knowledge”, through the development of cross-border liaisons and exchanges between the two universities. Our objective is to bring up new methods of tr...

Presentamos un análisis comparativo del desarrollo económico en China e India, teniendo en cuenta los principales factores que han propiciado el crecimiento del PIB real por habitante de ambos países en el período 1991-2005, con especial referencia al análisis de los efectos del capital humano, la industria y el comercio exterior, a través de la estimación de un modelo econométrico.

Downloadable! Poverty in Bolivia continues to be among the highest in Latin America despite decades of concerted national and international efforts to reduce it. Bolivia has meticulously followed the recommendations of the Washington consensus at the same time as external aid ...

A three period overlapping generations model is developed to investigate the impact of shorter life expectancy due to disease, on human capital investment decisions and income growth. This research is particularly relevant to Sub-Saharan Africa given the dramatic reduction in life expectancy due to HIV/AIDS and the potential lasting effects on growth. Our results indicate that as life expectancy shortens so does schooling inducing a lower growth rate of income. These relationships are even more pronounced for the African continent than for the rest of the world.

International migration is a historical phenomenon, which only recently has gained increasing importance, representing a focal point on the political agenda in most countries. One of the reasons is the deep transformation occurring in last decades, both at global and local level, of the role played by its protagonists that are turning to be transnational agents. This is especially true for the skilled professionals, who migrate internationally. As a matter of fact, international human capital mobility is now regarded as “brain circulation” rather than “brain drain”: this new concept concerns individuals who maintain frequent and continued social, economic and political ties with their country of origin, exceeding thereby the territorial and cultural boundaries. In this scenario, China is one of the main sending countries of highly-skilled migrants, through which it can built economic and academic relations with other economic and technological advanced countries. Recently, Chinese policy makers have started to consider the brain drain phenomenon as an opportunity for the transmission of business and technological know-how, as well as tacit knowledge that is hard to find through official channels. This article intends to contribute to the scientific debate on the subject, highlighting the international relevance of the so-called Overseas Chinese Professionals (OCPs), investigating their spatial distribution and features. Besides, the paper will examine the emerging returning flow and the challenge that the country will have to cope with in the next future to impose itself as a innovative leading economy

This paper examines the relationship between human and financial capital and firm performance for women-and men-owned small firms in the service and retail sectors. Results indicate that human capital variables, including education and experience, had a positive impact on the profitability of women-owned firms, whereas measures of financial capital had a greater impact of the profitability of men-owned firms. The ability to secure financial capital also had a positive impact on the growth rate of men-owned firms, but did not appear to affect the growth rate of womenowned firms. These findings suggest that the growth aspirations for women-owned firms may be driven by factors other than human capital or the ability to secure external capital.

This paper analyzes the life-cycle career costs associated with child rearing and decomposes their effects into unearned wages (as women drop out of the labor market), loss of human capital, and selection into more child-friendly occupations. We estimate a dynamic life-cycle model of fertility, occupational choice, and labor supply using detailed survey and administrative data for Germany for numerous birth cohorts across different regions. We use this model to analyze both the male-female wage gap as it evolves from labor market entry onward and the effect of pro-fertility policies. We show that a substantial portion of the gender wage gap is explainable by realized and expected fertility and that the long-run effect of policies encouraging fertility are considerably lower than the short-run effects typically estimated in the literature.

Objective. This study examines the effects of union density and government-sector employment on earnings inequality in Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States.Methods. Data on 167 MSAs from the 2000 Census are analyzed using standard regression techniques. Four measures of Atkinson's index (e=0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0) are used as the measure of earnings inequality for full-time, year-round workers.Results. MSAs with greater union density and greater government-sector employment have lower earnings inequality. The progressive effect of union density is strongest for earners in the middle of the distribution and less beneficial for workers at the bottom of the distribution. Government employment is generally associated with lower levels of earnings inequality, but state and federal government employment have the strongest effects.Conclusion. Even in the late 1990s, unions and government-sector employment remain effective at reducing earnings inequality.

This paper presents new empirical evidence from Egypt on the existence of intrahousehold allocation bias. We examine the effects of the women's status within the household on investment in children human capital -focusing specifically on children's schooling and nutrition. Special attention is paid to examine how the welfare of children living in an empowered female household is compared to their peers who live in low women's status households, and whether parents have identical preferences towards sons and daughters. The results confirm that empowered women are more able to make positive investments in their children. The influence of women's status may operate differently for boys and girls, and may differently affect children's educational outcome than their nutritional status. Also, we find that parents do not always have identical preferences towards sons and daughters.

Invariant, additive, and separable parameters for measures of human, social, and natural capital have repeatedly proven their value and utility globally over the last 50 years. Given growing demand for comparable living capital metrics, metrological organizations should position themselves to provide the needed calibration and traceability services.

This paper investigates the determinants of the survival, between 2001 and 2004, of 622 small firms in England. Seventy one percent of these firms were less than 5 years old in 2001. Prior work by industrial economists has primarily focussed upon factors such as profitability and exit barriers. In contrast, this paper adopts a more managerial approach by examining whether the human capital of the business owner and organisational variables explain survival and non-survival. Our results suggest the founder's education and bank ...

Given the concern about the low growth rates in African countries, this paper deals with the issue of how to increase the said growth rates by using South Africa as a case study. This paper attempts to answer this question by examining the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP)and productivity growth. We utilise the theoretical insights from the Solow (1956) growth model and its extension by Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992). Our empirical methodology is based on the London School of Economics Hendry’s General to Specific Instrumental Variable method and Gregory and Hansen’s (1996a; 1996b) structural break technique. Our findings imply that variables like human capital, trade openness, foreign direct investment, financial efficiency, democracy and financial reforms improves TFP and productivity growth in South Africa. Importantly, the key determinants appear to be democracy and financial liberalisation.

The presence of MEs has proven to strengthen the Indonesian economic stability. They are important for several reasons: their contributions to the national production, the total units of enterprises, and the creation of employment. Despite the fact that MEs are very potential for building a stable economic growth, developing MEs is a challenging issue. The most critical problem in today’s Indonesian MEs lies on Human Capital related issues. The study aims to explore the current Human Capital Management (HCM) initiatives and how it affect the sustainability of the organization. More specific, the study aims to describe the HCM policies, programs, and practices being employed by medium-sized manufacturing enterprises, and what factors act as enablers that motivate human capital to undertake the current HCM policies, programs, and practices. By using case study approach, preliminary prepositions are developed.

This article begins the synthesis of two currently unrelated literatures: the human capital approach to health economics and the economics of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. A lifecycle investment framework is the foundation for understanding the origins of human inequality and for devising policies to reduce it. Barker hypothesis ͉ critical periods ͉ early childhood ͉ sensitive periods T wo currently unrelated bodies of research in economics point to the importance of the early years of childhood in shaping many adult outcomes. The ''fetal programming'' literature surveyed by Gluckman and Hanson demonstrates that in utero environments affect adult health (1, 2). Robert Fogel demonstrates an important empirical relationship between early nutrition and adult health (3, 4). Barker demonstrates the predictive power of environmental insults in utero and in infancy for the onset of adult coronary disease, stroke, diabetes, and hypertension (5). Birthweight, fetal and maternal nutrition, growth by 1 year of age, etc. are all predictive of later adult health. Although the literature on the epidemiology of disease has taken a life cycle, developmental perspective, this approach has not yet made its way into the mainstream of health economics. For example, the influential analysis of Grossman focuses exclusive attention on adult health investment decisions, treating the health endowment determined in childhood and the preferences of adults as parameters determined outside of his model (6, 7). Parallel to the epidemiological literature, there is an emerging developmental literature in economics that demonstrates the importance of early environmental conditions on the evolution of adolescent and adult cognitive and noncognitive skills (8, 9). These skills are important determinants of educational attainment, crime, earnings, and participation in risky behaviors (10). Like the fetal programming literature, this literature documents critical and sensitive periods in the development of human capabilities. Unlike the fetal programming literature, it also considers environmental influences on development over the entire life cycle of the child and on into adulthood. Remediation of early disadvantage and resilience receive much more attention in this literature than in the literature on health economics. Each literature has much to learn from the other. Evidence on the importance of early environments on a spectrum of health, labor market, and behavioral outcomes suggests that common developmental processes are at work. Cognitive and noncognitive skills, such as self-regulation, motivation, time preference, far-sightedness, adventurousness, and the like, affect the evolution of health capital through choices made by parents and children. Grossman (7) and Smith (11) show that education is an important determinant of health disparities. The recent literature in economics shows the importance of personality and cognition in affecting educational choices. Aspects of personality and cognition play additional roles in affecting health and healthy behaviors beyond their direct effect on education (10, 12). Those with greater self-control and conscientiousness follow medical instructions and take care of themselves in a variety of ways. Certain personality types are at greater risk for mental health disorders (L. Borghans, A. L. Duckworth, J. Heckman, and B. ter Weel, unpublished data). Personality factors affect learning (13). Adverse health conditions impair learning. † Schultz and Ram (14) show that raising health promotes investment in human capital. People with longer horizons and lower rates of time preference invest more in themselves. Lower rates of time preference are associated with greater cognitive skills. Those with higher IQs are more farsighted (have lower time preference) because they envision future scenarios more clearly (15). The recent literature on personality and preference formation establishes causal impacts of parental inputs and other environmental factors on cognitive and noncognitive skills (ref. 9; L. Borghans, A. L. Duckworth, J. Heckman, B. ter Weel, unpublished data; and F. Cunha, J. Heckman, and S. M. Schennach, unpublished data). The parameters of the Grossman model are in fact the outputs of a developmental model. The developmental focus adopted in this article suggests previously uncharted channels of policy influence to remediate well documented health disparities. Early childhood interventions that affect personality traits and cognitive skills that promote health can be effective policy tools in preventing and curing disease. A simple investment framework unifies the literature on health and skill formation. It also reveals currently unexplored avenues for future research. The framework can be used to analyze synergies in producing health, cognitive skills, and noncognitive skills, which we group together as human capabilities. An econometric approach based on dynamic latent variables operationalizes this framework. This approach recognizes the proxy nature of variables like birthweight, height, nutrition, IQ scores, and measures of personality and mental illness that play prominent roles in empirical work in epidemiology, education and health economics. Human Diversity and Human Development Any analysis of human development must reckon with nine facts. First, ability matters. A large number of empirical studies document that cognitive ability is a powerful determinant of wages, schooling, participation in crime and success in many aspects of social and economic life (10, 16, 17) including health (18). Second, abilities are multiple in nature. Noncognitive abilities (perseverance, motivation, time preference, risk aversion, selfesteem, self-control, preference for leisure) have direct effects on wages (controlling for schooling), schooling, teenage pregnancy, smoking, crime, performance on achievement tests, and many other aspects of social and economic life (refs. 10 and 19 and L. Borghans, A. L. Duckworth, J. Heckman, and B. ter Weel, unpublished data). They affect health choices [see the evidence on time preference and health in Grossman (7)]. Social and emotional factors affect adult health (12).

This paper investigates the relationship between human capital and economic growth in Pakistan with aggregate time series data. Estimated with the Johansen (1991) approach, the fitted model indicates a critical role for human capital in boosting the economy’s capacity to absorb world technical progress. Much higher returns, including spillovers, to secondary schooling in Pakistan than in OECD economies is consistent with very substantial education under-investment in Pakistan. Similarly, extremely large returns to health spending compare very favorably with industrial investment. Human capital is estimated to have accounted for just under one-fifth of the increase in Pakistan’s GDP per head. Since the 1990s, the impact of deficient human capital policies is shown by the negative contribution to economic growth.

The theoretical literature identifies three important entrepreneurial dimensions, namely discovering new opportunities, responsiveness to uncertainty, and coordination of a firm. In the empirical literature, past experience has been identified as having an important influence on organizational behavior. This literature, however, focuses predominantly on the impact of experience on new opportunities using a resource-based view and human capital perspective. In contrast, we draw upon the cognitive science literature to argue that past experience shapes an entrepreneur's cognitive frame, and, hence, influences entrepreneurship in a more holistic manner. We provide econometric evidence of the impact of past experience on all three entrepreneurial dimensions from the small scale Indian pharmaceutical enterprises. JEL: L26, M10, D83

A 2006 survey of 28,000 individuals in 28 post-communist countries reveals overwhelming public support for the revision of privatization in the region. A majority of respondents, however, favors a revision of privatization that ultimately leaves firms in private hands. We identify which factors influence individuals' support for revising privatization and explore whether respondents' views are driven by a preference for state property or a concern for the fairness of privatization. We find that human capital poorly suited for a market economy with private ownership and a lack of privately owned assets increase support for revising privatization with the primary reason being a preference for state over private property. Economic hardships during transition and work in the state sector also increase support for revising privatization, but mainly due to the perceived unfairness of privatization. The effects of human capital and asset ownership on support for revising privatization are independent of a countries' institutional environment. In contrast, good governance institutions amplify the impact of positive and negative transition experiences on attitudes toward revising privatization. In countries with low inequality, individuals with positive and negative transition experiences hold significantly different views about the superiority of private property, but this difference is much smaller in countries with high inequality.

Polycentrism is a common feature of European urban systems. Lately, the concept has assumed a more normative relevance and it has been often considered as a pre-requisite for a more sustainable and balanced development across Europe. However, the effects of polycentrism on other main

The low mobility of people in Europe is considered a problem for adjustment to asymmetric shocks and regional convergence in the European Monetary Union. We suggest a complement to the traditional migration theories, the insider advantages approach to explain why most Europeans prefer to stay. Staying immobile they have accumulated work- and leisure-oriented insider advantages that are location-specific and would

Paced or Synchronous assembly lines are a popular class of assembly systems consisting of a series of assembly stations arranged in tandem. Every job (or order) visits all assembly stations in the same sequence and spends the same amount of time (known as the production cycle) at each station. Industries such as aircraft,¯re-engine, and automobile assembly have production cycles of a few hours and are labor intensive. In spite of increased automation in such industries, human capital remains the most expensive and important contributor to a°exible production system. In this article we formulate the cross-training problem on a paced assembly line with m stations (mCT ). We assume that each worker possesses a number of skills referred to as a skill vector. Our objective is to schedule a set of work orders through the assembly system so as to minimize the size of the required workforce and/or the workforce cross-training costs. We analyze the complexity of mCT and identify polynomially solvable cases. A variety of lower bounds is developed based on optimization techniques. These lower bounds are used to develop a branch and bound algorithm as well as to evaluate our heuristics. A computational experiment reports the performance of all algorithms. Using these algorithms, we examine how the formation of skill vectors a®ects the workforce size and draw guidelines for cross-training programs in organizations with labor intensive assembly operations.

O debate sobre o grau de flexibilidade/rigidez do mercado de trabalho é um tema recorrente quer para economistas quer para os agentes políticos, tendo assumido particular relevância a partir da crise petrolífera dos anos 70. A manutenção de elevados níveis de desemprego nos anos 70 e 80 colocaram em questão os regimes de proteção do emprego e da regulação das relações laborais até então praticados, considerados agora como excessivamente penalizadores dos despedimentos e dotados de uma rigidez excessiva, quer no domínio da fixação dos salários, quer no que diz respeito à organização do trabalho no interior da empresa. A solução encontrada para flexibilizar o mercado de trabalho adotada em muitos países, nomeadamente os do sul da Europa, e assim facilitar a criação de emprego, foi a de introduzir novas formas contratuais, nomeadamente contratos temporários, não alterando de forma substancial os direitos anteriormente adquiridos.

This paper discuss about the influx policy that should be taken by the government. Project-induced-in-migration (or influx) is the movement of people from area outside project-impacted zone to the project-impacted zone. The aim of it is to find economic opportunities and improving quality of their life. Aldi et al. (2013) stated that the influx has many negative effects especially for the social and environmental aspects in the mining project areas and its surrounding.The three main negative effect that are materialized, (i) The increasing of crime rate; (ii) the marginalization of indigenous people by the immigrant communities; and (iii) the decreasing of public health quality since the mining operation. Three important actors in development, which are the government as policy makers, the companies as capital modals, and society as the object who affected both directly or indirectly; each of them has their own role play and perception of influx. They also have own solution to cope ...

When this is written, the world holds its breath, waiting for the US to decide on a plan to save the countrys (and the worlds in prolongation) financial market. What and who will dictate growth and prosperity internationally in the future are at stake. This is also a moment for developing deeper understanding of underlying spatial prerequisites for the interdependency of local, regional and global knowledge driven economies. This paper introduces a proposed research project with an aim to analyse the relation between the spatial constitution of urban regions and their relative success in the international competition for talent, capital and investments. Spatial analysis will be conducted both on the macro level: the relation and accessibility between urban regional nodes and on the micro level: the spatial structure of the urban nodes themselves. The project is a trans-disciplinary collaboration between economic geography and urban morphology and has the following objectives: one, t...

Conventional growth theories in the literature explain the poor economic performance of African economies by stressing the inadequacy of savings, human capital, and poor institutional quality. However, the key question is how to enhance savings for the accumulation of both physical and human capital in order to spur growth. A common thread that runs through the existing models is that the dependency ratio, not only remains constant over time, but has no long-run negative impact on economic growth. By relaxing this rigid assumption, this paper constructs a growth estimating equation which accommodates this demographic factor. The analytic results from the modified model suggest that economies with high dependency ratio face their stable equilibrium at lower levels of their income per capita. Moreover, econometric results from analysis of panel data drawn from Sub-Saharan Africa economies suggest that the growth puzzle can be well explained in terms of the demographic factors, especia...