Human capital is widely acknowledged as a key factor for economic performance at both the micro and macro level. Despite the fact that a large fraction of human capital accumulation takes place after the entry into the labor market, most of the existing literature that investigates the returns to investment in human capital has focused on education, due to measurement problems and data availability. Relatively little evidence is available, instead, on the accumulation of human capital through the lifelong training of workers and, more specifically, on the effects of training on productivity.
A number of studies have tried to fill this gap by analysing the impact of training on productivity using firm-level data. However, this literature does not provide a consistent picture, as the lack of longitudinal data has generally made it difficult to control for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity of training (e.g. Bartel, 1994, Bishop, 1994, Black and Lynch, 1996, Barrett and O’Connell, 2001). Some recent studies have tackled this problem by focusing on panel data at industry-level (e.g. Dearden et al., 2006, Conti, 2005). This approach, however, does not allow to estimate the private returns to training, as analyses based on industry-level data also capture spillover effects between firms. There exists a recent literature that investigates the effects of training on productivity using firm-level panel data, but it is generally hampered either by the specificity of the sample (e.g. Almeida and Carneiro, 2006), or by the limited number of observations in the sectional dimension (Ballot et al., 2006; Zwick, 2005, 2006) or in the time dimension (Black and Lynch, 2001).
India is in a phase of rapid economic and demographic transition. Per capita income has been rising steadily since the 1980s. Life expectancy is increasing and birth rates are falling. The impressive growth rates of the 1980s were maintained in the last decade with reforms to open up the Indian economy. Poverty levels continue to decline as does the incidence of malnutrition and stunting. A key feature of this remarkable period of growth has been the change in the nature of the Indian diet. As the world economy becomes more integrated and communication faster, diet transition would have been inevitable. But it is clear that during the most recent decade globalisation has played an enormously important role in the transformation of food consumption patterns of Indian households. This is particularly evident in urban areas. The change in consumer tastes and demand has critical implications for the whole food supply system.
The present paper looks at the impact of globalisation on both the demand side and the supply side of the food system in India. Pingali (2004) has identified six key stylised facts characterising the changes in food demand in Asia. These facts pertain to changes in the consumption of rice, wheat, protein and energy-dense foods, and diet diversification. We explain these facts by identifying a two-stage process of diet transformation. During the first stage consumers move away from inferior goods to superior foods and substitute some traditional staples with primary food products that are more prevalent in western diets.
The present paper investigates migrant female entrepreneurship on the basis of driving forces, motivation and performance of migrant women entrepreneurs. We review the factors that push migrant females towards entrepreneurship and that determine their entrepreneurial performance. In order to understand and test the determinant factors behind the motivation towards entrepreneurship as well as the economic and survival performance of migrant women entrepreneurs, this paper addresses in the empirical part Turkish female entrepreneurs in Amsterdam. The data and information used for evaluation are based on in-depth personal interviews. As a rather novel methodological contribution, a recently developed artificial intelligence method, i.e. rough set analysis, is deployed to assess and identify the most important factors in motivation and performance of migrant females.
The main feature of economic restructuring in the last decades has been a marked shift from employment in large firms to self-employment in small firms. This trend has been most pronounced among members of two different groups: immigrants and women. The increasing rate of business ownership among both immigrant groups and women has become one of the driving forces of the growth of national economies, in particular, in the US and in many countries in Europe (Barrett et al., 1996; Borjas, 1986 and 1990; Center for Women’s Business Research, 2004 and 2005; Cross, 1992; GEM, 2004; Gorter et al., 1998; Kloosterman et al., 1998; OECD 2001a, 2001b and 2006; Weeks 2001; Pearce, 2005). Actually, both ethnic and female participation in terms of self-employment and entrepreneurship are seen as powerful economic forces and contributors to a solution to structural labor market problems in many industrialized countries.
