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Real gross domestic product (GDP) growth for Mauritius has averaged more than 5 per cent since 1970 and GDP per capita has increased more than tenfold between 1970 and 2012, from less than $500 to more than $9,000. It has often been reported that human capital, along with other growth enablers, has played an important role in this development. The purpose of this paper is to study this nexus.

A human capital augmented Cobb-Douglas production function is used, where output is also a function of capital and labour. One of the innovations of the present paper is the use of a composite index to proxy human capital. The authors investigate the impact of human capital on economic growth in a dynamic vector error correction modelling (VECM) framework.

The general results here show that stock, labour and human capital are all significant growth determinants, with human capital having a long-run output elasticity of 0.36. The VECM results generally validated the long-run output elasticity, although a relatively lower elasticity of 0.1 is obtained. Both sets of results tend to point to the fact that human capital has significantly contributed to economic growth in Mauritius.

The current paper paves the way for future work, which can build on the composite HCI developed here and aggregate it with relevant variables representing tertiary education and training, to better analyze and further understand the role of human capital on economic growth in Mauritius.

Here, the authors posit that human capital is an aggregate of health, education and nutrition, and the authors use a composite index along with other contributing factors to study its impact on economic growth, within a VECM framework.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of female human capital on economic growth in the Indian economy during 1970-2014.

The paper employs Ng-Perron unit root test to check the order of integration of the variables. The study also used ARDL-bounds testing approach and the unrestricted error-correction model to investigate co-integration in the long run and short run; Granger’s causality test to investigate the direction of the causality; and variance decomposition test to capture the influence of each variable on economic growth.

The study constructed a composite index for both male and female human capitals by taking education and health as a proxy for human capital. The empirical findings reveal that female human capital is significant and positively related to economic growth in both short run and long run, while male human capital is positive but insignificant to the economic growth; same is the case for physical capital, it implies that such investment regarding female human capital needs to be reinforced. Further, there is an evidence of a long-run causal relationship from female human capital, male human capital and physical capital to economic growth variable. The results of variance decomposition show the importance of the female human capital variable is increasing over the time and it exerts the largest influence in change in economic growth.

The empirical findings suggest that the Indian economy has to pay attention equally on the development of female human capital for short-run as well as long-run growth of the economy. This implies that the policy makers should divert more expenditure for developing support for female education and health.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the relationship between female human capital and economic growth in the context of the Indian economy.

Drawing on the systems theory and the natural resource-based view, the purpose of this paper is to advance an integrated resource efficiency view (IREV) and derive a composite “integrated resource efficiency index” (IRE-index) for assessing the environmental, economic, and social resource efficiencies of production economies.

Using sub-national input-output data, the IRE-index builds on the human development index (HDI) and the OECD green growth indicators by including functions for environmental resource efficiency, energy, and material productivity. The study uses multiple regressions to examine and compare the IRE-index of 40 countries, including 34 OECD nations. The study further compares the IRE-index to similar composite indicators such as the human sustainable development index (HSDI) and the ecological footprint.

The IRE-index reveals a discrepancy between social development and resource efficiency in many of the world’s wealthiest production economies. Findings also show that material productivity has been the key driver for observed improvements in IRE over time. The index is a robust macro-level methodology for assessing resource efficiency and sustainability, with implications for production operations in global supply chains.

The IREV and IRE-index both contribute towards advancing green supply chain management and sustainability, and country-level resource efficiency accounting and reporting. The IRE-index is a useful composite for capturing aggregate environmental, economic, and social resource efficiencies of production economies. The paper clearly outlines the managerial, academic, and policy implications of the IREV and resulting index.

The measurement and comparison across countries of female conditions in labour market and gender gap in employment is a very complex task, given both its multidimensional nature and the different scenarios in terms of economic, social and cultural characteristics. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

At this aim, different information about presence and engagement of women in labour market, gender pay gap, segregation, discrimination and human capital characteristics was combined and a ranking of 26 European countries is proposed through the composite indicator methodology. It satisfies the need to benchmark national gender gaps, grouping together economic, political and educational dimensions.

The results show that female conditions in labour market are the best in Scandinavian countries and Ireland while many Eastern and Southern European countries result at the bottom of classification.

In order to take into account the subjectivity of some choices in composite indicator construction and to test robustness of results, different aggregation techniques were applied.

The authors hope that this new index will stimulate the release of a sort of best practices useful to close labour market gaps, starting from best countries’ scenarios, and the launching of pilot gender parity task forces, as it happened with the Global Gender Gap Index in some countries. Finally, relating gender gap indexes with country policies frameworks for gender inequalities and the connected policy outcomes, it is possible to evaluate their effectiveness and to identify the most adequate initiatives to undertake because policies reducing gender gaps can significantly improve economic growth and standard of living.

The analysis gives a contribution in the evaluation of the policies and regulations effectiveness at national level considering the existing welfare regimes and the associated gaps in labour market. It can help policy makers to understand the ramifications of gaps between women and men. The Gender Gap Labour Market Index is constrained by the need for international comparability, but limiting its analysis to European countries; it has been based on ad hoc indicators concerning developed economies and could be readily adapted for use at the national and local levels.

In this paper the authors propose a new composite indicator index specifically focused on gender gap in labour market. Several papers analysed gender differences in wages, employment or segregation, but few of them consider them together, allowing to get a satisfactory informative picture on gender inequalities in labour market and studying in deep its multiple aspects, including discrimination indicators ad hoc calculated, giving to policy makers an useful tool to evaluate female employees conditions and put them in relation with the different input factors existing within each country.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the way in which the knowledge competitiveness of regions is measured and further introduces the World Knowledge Competitiveness Index (WKCI) benchmarking tool.

The methodology consists of an econometric analysis of key indicators relating to the concept of knowledge competitiveness for 125 regions from across the globe consisting of 55 representatives from North America, 45 from Europe and 25 from Asia and Oceania.

The key to winning the super competitive race in the knowledge‐based economy is investment in the future: research and development, and education and training. It is found that the majority of the high‐performing regional economies in the USA have a knowledge competitive edge over their counterparts in Europe and Asia.

To an extent, the research is limited by the availability of comparable indicators and metrics at the regional level that extend across the globe. Whilst comparative data are often accessible at the national level, regional data sources remain underdeveloped.

The WKCI has become internationally recognized as an important instrument for economic development policymakers and regional investment promotion agents as they create and refine their strategies and targets. In particular, it has provided a benchmark that allows regions to compare their knowledge competitiveness with other regions for around the world and not only their own nation or continent.

The WKCI is the first composite and relative measure of the knowledge competitiveness of the globe's best performing regions.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

Developing composite index-regional entrepreneurship, technological readiness and institution quality index (RETRIQ) of regional entrepreneurship, technology readiness and quality of institution to measure regional competitiveness. This study, also, aims to test econometrically the effectiveness of the index in capturing the economic performance of the sub-national regions.

The data of eight indicators used in the index are from sources available freely in the public domain. The causal relationship analysis is done using panel data of 10 years from 2008 to 2017 for 32 Indian states/union territories. The generalized method of moments (GMM) is used for this dynamic regression estimation.

Based on RETRIQ, 32 states and union territories of India have ranked. The estimation using GMM shows a significant association between the composite index and economic growth.

The limitations of the study include the broad assumption that these sub-national regions belong to a uniform macro-economic and technology environment and data constraints as it is a longitudinal study. Then, the implication of the study is that the composite index-RETRIQ could capture differences in regional competitiveness explaining regional economic disparity.

The index will be useful for policy implications in the assessment of competitiveness disparity.

It is a composite index of regional entrepreneurship, technological readiness and quality of the institution. The panel data across states along 10 years series is novel.

As an economic development strategy, entrepreneurship policies should target innovative activities – those which Schumpeter described as leading to new goods, production methods, markets, input sources, or new industries. However, popular entrepreneurship proxies, such as firm births (<500 employees) and sole proprietorships, capture multiple types of entrepreneurship which may have conflicting qualities. To address the need for more accurate measures of Schumpeterian activity, indices are constructed to specifically measure the relative amount of Schumpeterian activity among US states. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Four composite indices of Schumpeterian activity are constructed using different methods to combine variables related to innovative activity into single indicator, since there is uncertainty about the weighting of dimensions: principal component analysis (PCA), factor analysis (FA), data envelopment analysis and equal weights. Robustness checks were used to compare state rankings across indices. These indices were also compared to common entrepreneurship proxies and real GDP to demonstrate and justify their measurement of Schumpeterian activity.

The results show that the Schumpeterian Activity Indices (SAIs) similarly rank states and measure phenomena different from the common proxies of entrepreneurship. Furthermore, these indices better predict GDP than the common proxies. Lastly, state rankings based upon the SAIs support previous research suggesting that innovation and agglomeration economies are interrelated.

The paper demonstrates a methodology for constructing a measure of innovative activity, which is necessary to develop and evaluate entrepreneurship policy for economic development.

This paper aims to present a methodological framework for the identification of a hierarchy among the three categories of intellectual capital, i.e. human, organizational/structural and relational capital, with respect to their contribution to the objective of improving a library's performance. It also seeks to provide a case study of Greek central public libraries.

The framework is based on an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) application including utilization of a Delphi method and ISO 11620 international standards. Finally, empirical evidence is produced for the Greek central public libraries.

The proposed framework may be employed for prioritizing intangible assets in libraries. For the Greek central public libraries it has been indicated that human capital contributes more than the organizational/structural capital and this in turn more than the relational capital.

Although the proposed methodological framework is intended to be widely applicable, the case study results cannot be directly generalized due to the uniqueness of the Greek public libraries environment.

A hierarchy may be an invaluable tool for the library's management in order to better utilize the intangible resources and effectively allocate investments to human, organizational and relation capital assets in order to improve the library's performance

The paper shows that the framework for building a hierarchy of intellectual capital in libraries is based on a rather challenging research approach for prioritizing intangible assets with respect to predefined management objectives.

The purpose of this study is to develop an index for financial constraints, specifically for restaurant firms, and to further validate the developed financial constraint index.

This study used logistic regression with a composite criterion based on the dividend payout ratio, KZ index and Cleary index to estimate restaurant firms’ financial constraints. Then, a fixed-effects regression was used to verify the validity of the measurement of restaurant firms’ financial constraints.

A restaurant firm’s operating profit, financial leverage, asset tangibility, sale of fixed assets and percentage change in number of employees are critical indicators for identifying financial constraints. The results indicated that in cases with positive operating cash flows, the effect of operating cash flow on capital investments continuously decreased as restaurant firms’ financial constraints increased.

This study is unique in that the specific financial and operational characteristics of restaurant firms were included in the model to determine financial constraint indicators, such as sale of fixed assets and percentage change in number of employees.