Prof Andreas Wörgötter on addressing current and persisting challenges in South Africa’s labour market
At a time when tensions are rising due to growing inequality and unemployment, ERSA’s host is joined by Prof. Andreas Wörgötter from the Vienna University of Technology to discuss some of the key takings from his research co-authored with Christopher Loewald, and Konstantin Makrelov called ‘Addressing low labour utilization in South Africa’. In this podcast […]
Part 2: Recovery policies and labour utilization
The discussion is based on two research papers: Recovering from COVID-19: Economic scenarios for South Africa by Dirk van Seventer, Channing Arndt, Robert J. Davies, Sherwin Gabriel, Laurence Harris, and Sherman Robinson and Addressing low labour utilisation in South Africa, by Christopher Loewald, Konstantin Makrelov and Andreas Wörgötter (see below) that explores the main challenges […]
Teacher human capital, teacher effort and student achievements in Kenya
Although research generally shows that teachers matter for student achievements, it is not clear what attributes make a teacher more successful in enhancing students’ performance. Much of the empirical work has focused on observable teacher characteristics. In this paper, we go further than that. We examine how teacher subject knowledge, pedagogical skill, effective instruction time […]
Education and Fertility: Panel Time-Series Evidence from Southern Africa
In this paper I investigate whether secondary school enrollment has played any role on total fertility rates in all fifteen countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) between 1980 and 2009. The evidence, based on panel time-series analysis (I make use of the Pooled OLS, Fixed Effects, Common Correlated Effects and Fixed Effects with […]
How Does Colonial Origin Matter for Economic Performance in sub-Saharan Africa?
This paper investigates the channels through which colonial origin affects economic outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It focuses on four key channels of transmission namely, human capital, trade openness, market distortion and selection bias. In contrast with previous studies where only initial conditions at independence were held to influence the subsequent growth path, the methodology […]
A theory of colonial goverance
This paper considers conditions of optimality in a co-optive strategy of colonial rule. It proposes a simple model of elite formation emanating from a coloniser’s quest to maximise extracted rents from its colonies. The results suggest multiple optimal solutions, depending on the specification of the production function, the governance technology chosen by the coloniser and […]
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