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A review of and future research agenda on women entrepreneurship in Africa
No full textPurpose:
This paper seeks to systematically review and synthesise existing research knowledge on African women entrepreneurship to identify gaps for future studies.
Design/methodology/approach:
The paper conducted a systematic literature review of published studies from 1990 to 2020 on women entrepreneurship in Africa using a 5M gender aware framework of Brush et al. (2009).
Findings:
The systematic literature review of published studies found the fragmentation, descriptive and prescriptive orientation of studies on Africa women entrepreneurship and devoid of theoretical focus. Further, women entrepreneurship studies tended to be underpinned from various disciplines, less from the entrepreneurship lens, mostly quantitative, and at its infancy stage of development. With a primary focus on development, enterprise performance and livelihood, studies rarely attended to issues of motherhood and the nuanced understanding of women entrepreneurship’s embeddedness in family and institutional contexts of Africa.
Research limitations/implications:
The paper questions the view that women entrepreneurship is a “panacea” and unravels how family context, customary practices, poverty and, rural-urban and formal/informal divide, significantly shape and interact with African women entrepreneurs’ enterprising experience and firm performance.
Practical implications:
The findings and analyses indicate that any initiatives to support women empowerment via entrepreneurship should consider the socially constructed nature of women entrepreneurship and the subtle interplay of the African institutional contexts’ intricacies, spatial and locational differences which significantly influence women entrepreneurs’ choices, motivations and goals for enterprising.
Originality/value:
The paper contributes to a holistic understanding of women entrepreneurship in Africa by using a 5M framework to review the research knowledge. In addition, the paper not only identifies unexplored/or less examined issues but also questions the taken-for-granted assumptions of existing knowledge and suggest adoption of context- and gender-sensitive theories and methods
GMNIA with beam elements and strain limits based fire design approach for steel beams and beam–columns
Get PDFThe use of advanced analysis techniques harnessing the capabilities of the currently available computational resources can lead to considerably more accurate fire design of steel structures relative to the currently adopted simple fire design methods in practice. In this paper, a structural steel fire design method by Geometrically and Materially Nonlinear Analysis with Imperfections (GMNIA) and using strain limits is put forward for the fire design of steel beams and beam–columns. In the proposed fire design method, the GMNIA of a steel member or structure is performed using computationally efficient beam finite elements and strain limits are adopted to account for the detrimental effects of local buckling on the ultimate capacities. To verify the accuracy of the proposed method, extensive numerical parametric studies are conducted through shell finite element modelling. The results indicate that the proposed approach provides accurate and safe ultimate resistance and limit temperature estimations for steel beams and beam–columns in fire, with a considerably higher level of accuracy and reliability relative to the provisions of the European structural steel fire design standard EN 1993-1-2
Spelling it out, making it count : functional skills in vocational training
Get PDFSpelling It Out, Making It Count explores whether FSQs are still serving their intended purpose as practical, real-world alternatives to GCSEs that focus on developing essential life and work skills.
Through interviews, focus groups, and detailed analysis of FSQ content, performance, and costs, the research uncovered several issues:
- Pass rates for FSQs have fallen significantly in recent years, despite the difficulty of exams remaining largely unchanged. This appears linked to reduced contextualization of exam questions.
- Funding rates for FSQs have remained static since 2014 and are now insufficient to cover delivery costs, forcing providers to operate at a loss. For FSQs taken within apprenticeships, the financial burden can be as high as £440 per qualification.
- The mandatory requirement for apprentices to pass Level 2 FSQs, despite failure to do so not necessarily reflecting deficiencies in applied skills, continues to hinder apprenticeship completion rates and will hamper government efforts to raise achievement rates from 52% to 67%.
To remedy these issues, the ‘Spelling It Out, Making It Count’ report makes 7 key recommendations, including:
- Maintaining the applied, real-world focus of FSQs to differentiate them from GCSEs
- Increasing contextualization of exam questions
- Reviewing maths exam structure and breadth of topics
- Promoting diverse assessment methods beyond exams
- Incorporating FSQ training within apprenticeship off-the-job hours
- Reconsidering FSQs as a mandatory exit requirement for apprenticeships
- Uplifting FSQ funding immediately by at least 10% to cover delivery costs
The Spelling It Out, Making It Count report argues these changes are urgently needed to restore FSQs as effective demonstrations of functional literacy and numeracy vital for life and work
Military culture and institutional trust : evidence from conscription reforms in Europe
Get PDFDoes military conscription reduce the distance between the ordinary citizen and the state? Decades after its abolition, numerous European policymakers from across the political spectrum advocate the reintroduction of conscription to foster civic virtues, despite a lack of empirical evidence in this respect. Leveraging quasi-random variation in conscription reforms across 15 European countries, we find that cohorts of men drafted just before its abolition display significantly and substantially lower institutional trust than cohorts of men who were just exempted. At the same time, ending conscription had no effect on institutional trust among women from comparable cohorts. Results are neither driven by more favourable attitudes towards the government, nor by educational choices. Instead, this civil-military gap unfolds through the formation of a homogeneous community with uniform values. We argue that reintroducing a compulsory military service may not produce the effects anticipated by its advocate
‘They did not ask for this life’ : a child rights approach to photographing the children of celebrities
Get PDFFor years, there have been relentless pleas by celebrities for their children to be left alone by persistent and frightening paparazzi. Despite two seminal cases heard in UK courts in 2008 and 2014 concerning, respectively, the privacy rights of the children of J.K. Rowling and Paul Weller, a glance at the online pages of UK news outlets reveals that unpixellated photographs of celebrity children remain commonplace. This article will argue that not enough is being done to protect the children of celebrities from press intrusion, and that a child rights-based approach, couched in the best interests of the child, should be adopted, better to regulate the behaviour of the media when it comes to the taking and publishing of photographs of children, even if pixelated in the final publication
Exchange rates and binary political events
No full textThis article introduces a rational expectations model that explains exchange rate dynamics and the predictability of forecast errors using private (aggregated via order flow) and public (probabilities of a binary event) information. We test the model for the periods leading up to the presidential impeachment vote in Brazil, the Brexit Referendum, and Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Proxies of the physical probabilities of these events reveal that they are a crucial source of pricing information for the BRL, GBP, and MXN currency pairs with the US dollar. They also explain forecast errors. The information content of order flow changes before and after an actual regime change resolves uncertainty
Data-driven envelopment with privacy-policy tying
Get PDFWe present a theory of monopoly protection by means of entry in adjacent markets that have a common customer base (i.e., envelopment). A firm dominant in its market enters a datarich secondary market and engages in predatory pricing and privacy-policy tying. We define the latter as conditioning service provision to the subscription of a privacy-policy that allows bundling of user data across all sources. Acquiring data from the secondary market confers an advantage in the data-intensive primary market that shields the dominant firm from entry, thus harming consumers. We discuss potential remedies, including data unbundling and portability
Modeling and forecasting macroeconomic downside risk
No full textWe model permanent and transitory changes of the predictive density of US GDP growth. A substantial increase in downside risk to US economic growth emerges over the last 30 years, associated with the long-run growth slowdown started in the early 2000s. Conditional skewness moves procyclically, implying negatively skewed predictive densities ahead and during recessions, often anticipated by deteriorating financial conditions. Conversely, positively skewed distributions characterize expansions. The modelling framework ensures robustness to tail events, allows for both dense or sparse predictor designs, and delivers competitive out-of-sample (point, density and tail) forecasts, improving upon standard benchmarks
Positivity of the symmetric group characters is as hard as the polynomial time hierarchy
No full textWe prove that deciding the vanishing of the character of the symmetric group is C_P-complete. We use this hardness result to prove that the absolute value and also the square of the character are not contained in #P, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the second level. This rules out the existence of any (unsigned) combinatorial description for the square of the characters. As a byproduct of our proof, we conclude that deciding positivity of the character is PP-complete under many-one reductions, and hence PH-hard under Turing reductions