How can Artificial Intelligence help rural entrepreneurs succeed in business? A new article applies five machine learning techniques, providing new insights into factors related to trust, awareness of current trends, use of media tools, etc.
How can private sector initiatives, including venture start-ups and social impact funds, best contribute to the 2030 Agenda? The key, according to a new paper, is to ensure innovations are aligned with public policy impact.
How can firms in developing countries build new capabilities in local, regional and global value chains of services? A new article investigates governance and learning in the IT-enabled services industry of South Africa.
These are just three questions tackled by our researchers in January 2021 — in one UNESCO report, two journal articles, and four working papers, among many others. Click here for the full list of our most recent publications.
Journal articles
‘Governance and learning in global, regional, and local value chains: The IT-enabled services industry in South Africa‘ examines and compares the role of involvement in different types of value chains in stimulating supplier learning in the context of the IT-enabled service (ITES) industry. The study distinguishes between different types of learning and argues that learning outcomes depend crucially on value chain governance: the power balance and interactions between the lead firms and suppliers. Findings show that learning is generally and strongly enhanced by trust-based governance of the client-supplier relationship, while in GVCs, control-based governance additionally promotes learning specifically in the IT domain. These results provide a better understanding of how firms in developing countries can build capabilities in local, regional and global value chains of services. By Dr. Charlotte Keijser, Prof. René Belderbos and Dr. Micheline Goedhuys.
‘A machine learning approach to rural entrepreneurship‘ offers a novel means of understanding the mechanisms of rural entrepreneurship by applying five alternative machine learning techniques on data obtained from the Life in Transition Survey III. Results of the article highlight how capital constraints, age, factors related to trust and over‐trust, awareness of current trends, the use of various media tools, a competitive character, institutional factors, and education are associated with the success and failure of potential entrepreneurs in rural areas who attempt to set up a business. The final predictions are achieved with accuracies ranging from 72 to 92 percent. By Dr. Mehmet Guney Celbis.
Book chapters
‘Economic deprivation: Approaches, causes, and consequences for violent conflicts‘ is a volume chapter in ‘The Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals’. The volume addresses addresses SDG 16, namely “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels” and contains the description of a range of terms, which allow a better understanding and foster knowledge. By Dr. Pui-hang Wong.
Working papers
‘Transformation towards Sustainable Development Goals: Role of innovation ecosystems for inclusive, disruptive advances in five Asian case studies’ explores the potential of the innovation ecosystem to understand emerging private sector initiatives to meet the social agenda through innovations that are disruptive and inclusive. The paper examines four types of businesses: venture capital, an incubator, venture start-ups, and a social impact fund. A common feature underlying these cases is the creation of tailored innovation ecosystems that effectively utilise complementary assets. Currently, these activities are self-generated without much government support. However, by aligning with public policy impact they can be accelerated towards achieving the SDGs. Examining cases as ‘signals’ provide hints for how policy can be formulated to scale-up and transform currently isolated private initiatives. By Dr. Michiko Iizuka et al.
‘Labour-augmenting technical change data for alternative elasticities of substitution, growth, slowdown, and distribution dynamics’ solves the standard production function with constant elasticity of substitution (CES) for its labour augmenting technology term. The authors make capital stock data and insert them together with data from Penn World Tables (PWT9.1). This provides labour augmenting technology levels and growth rates for alternative elasticities of substitution for 70 countries, 1950‐2017. Dynamics of coefficient of variation and kernel density distributions for LATC growth rates shows that there is neither technological convergence nor divergence. By Dr. Thomas Ziesemer.
‘Access to social protection for platform and other non-standard workers: A literature review’ systematically reviews the existing literature on the different measures applied to extend social protection to include new forms of employment with a focus on European countries and a subset of OECD countries. The study focuses first on how non‐standard, and in particular platform workers are classified and legally protected. Secondly, the paper reviews the extent to which platform and other non‐standard workers have access to the different forms of social security provisions. The lack of statutory and effective social protection coverage of platform workers can be addressed in various ways. These include adjusting existing schemes in terms of eligibility criteria, portability of transfers, incorporating digital innovation, and providing flexible security. Current shifts in policies have the potential to decrease socioeconomic differences between different employment statuses. Ultimately, these shifts promote the transferability of individuals’ social rights between employment statuses and ease the use of individual social protection accounts. By Dr. Tamara A. Kool, researcher Giulio Bordon and Prof. Franziska Gassmann.
‘School-related violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Building an evidence base for stronger schools’ is the first study to use data from UNESCO’s Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study for nationally representative samples of sixth-grade students to determine the prevalence of bullying and its association to learning outcomes in 15 countries of the LAC region. The paper then looks at interventions to mitigate the impacts of violence. By Dr. Victor Cebotari et al.
Discussion papers
‘A robustness check to Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology. The case of Nigeria’ is the first study to employ a robustness check to the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology. Using Nigerian MODA as the baseline study, the authors introduce three sets of parametric changes to the analysis. The paper confirms the robustness of MODA methodology to parametric changes and highlights the importance of contextualising the evidence in the national realm. By Teju Fagbeja and Dr. Victor Cebotari.
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