This dissertation consists of three essays in labor and development economics. The first essay, “Bumpy Rides: School to Work Transitions in South Africa,” quantifies the importance of the option to re-enroll in the school to work transition of South African youth. I estimate a structural...

Wage and income surveys covering the period 1989-1999 are used to display changes in inequality of earnings and main factors of disparities. In the first part, increasing differences in the Czech Republic and the decreasing weight of demographic characteristics in wage structure are observed. In...

This paper examines the changes in relative earnings of workers with different education levels during Vietnam’s transition. It is found that females enjoy a higher return to education than males do in 1998, reversing the situation observed five years ago. A large fall in the returns to...

Calculating greenhouse gas emissions reductions from climate change mitigation projects requires construction of a baseline that sets emissions levels that would have occurred without the project. This paper describes a standardized multiproject methodology for setting baselines, represented by...

This paper is concerned with the determinants of international steam-coal trade. Most work in projecting coal trade has been either qualitative (a consensus of experts) or, if quantitative, has been based on competitive spatial-equilibrium models. Unfortunately, the competitive model of trade...

The study of demographic trends in sub-Saharan Africa though crucial in the assessment of the impact of population size and growth on the overall socio-economic development in the region, has received the least attention due to lack of reliable data for most of the countries. This paper focuses...

Although theories in both evolutionary biology and economics predict that an individual’s health should be associated with the individual’s time preference, no prior study has been done to empirically support or refute such predictions. By collecting detailed measures of health, time...

In the leading chapter of this dissertation, "Unemployment, Vulnerability and Poverty: A New Class of Measures, Its Axiomatic Properties and Applications," we, Kaushik Basu and myself, derive a new class of measures for unemployment or poverty. Measures of unemployment and poverty have usually...

Increasing customer demand for quality products and services have virtuallyforced organisations to adopt quality in every aspect of their business enterprises.Due to dynamic technological, political and economic changes in the world ofbusiness, the science of management is volatile. Higher...

In South Africa, SME development has been identified by government as a priority increating jobs to solve high unemployment.SMEs also often battle to survive in a tough and ever changing business world. There isa high failure rate among many SMEs. Some of the reasons for the high rate of...