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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of women in the small island economy by focussing on the education sector and labour market access. First, we analyse the educational path of women in Mauritius and second we examine the labour market opportunities available to them. We link the two sectors by adopting a gender perspective. Third, we investigate whether the same opportunities are made available to both men and women and whether or not there exist a gender gap in economic participation in the country.

The author used data from the World Bank Development Indicators (2012) for a comparative analysis of the gender situation in Mauritius relative to other African countries. Gender statistics were also made available from the statistical office: statistics, Mauritius. The Global Gender Gap Report (2012) and the SADC Gender Protocol Barometer 2012 were used as secondary data.

The analysis reveals that though girls’ outperform boys at all education levels, starting from primary, secondary and tertiary level, their access to job opportunities are reduced. Female unemployment rate is higher than that of male unemployment and even for those women who manage to enter the labour market, they remain in the low-occupation jobs. This puzzling relationship between good educational performance and female unemployment or low-occupation may first be explained by the wrong choice of subjects at secondary and tertiary levels. Mauritian women are more likely to obtain a degree in education and humanities which are the traditional areas rather than moving to the non-traditional spheres of science and engineering. Hence, not only is it difficult for them to penetrate the labour market which is already saturated in these traditional disciplines but jobs in these fields may not be in the high wage range. Consequently, these subject choices have repercussions for the occupations they choose and the wages they earn. Significant and persistent gaps remain in the fields of study that women and men choose as part of their formal education. These gaps translate henceforth into gender differences in employment and ultimately into differences in productivity and earnings.

No study has focused on the puzzling link between good education performance of girls and their inability to access the labour market in Mauritius.

In spite of the War on Poverty programs of the 1960s and the economic boom of the 1990s, poverty remains consistently high among families with children in the USA. The main source of income for these families is employment, which is largely a function of educational attainment. The purpose of this paper is to turn to aggregate and individual level data and demonstrate the power of college education in economic well‐being of women with children.

A nationally representative sample of single and married mothers was retrieved and the role of education in economic well‐being of these women was examined using descriptive, bi‐variate, and multiple ordinal logistic regression.

Both married and single mothers benefit immensely from a bachelors degree.

In recent years, policy makers in the USA have trimmed resources that promote education among poor women with children. This analysis, underscores the importance of postsecondary education in the economic well‐being of mothers with children and therefore the need for social policy promoting college education.

This article shows the power of education on economic well‐being of both married and single women with children.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between knowledge-economy and economic growth in 16 Asia-Pacific (AP) countries during the period 2011–2018. The study also aims to investigate a diversity of knowledge-economy pillars, including tertiary education, domestic innovation, foreign innovation, economic incentives and institutional regime and information and communications technologies (ICTs) and their relation to economic growth.

The study applies a comparative empirical analysis using pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), one-step difference generalised methods of moments (GMM) and bias-corrected least-squares dummy variables (LSDVc) estimators to test this relationship.

Pooled OLS estimators deemed suboptimal to the panel data under study, while GMM results reveal a significant relationship between tertiary education, domestic and foreign innovation, government expenditure and investments with economic growth. Of these results, domestic innovation, investments and government consumption are positively correlated with economic growth, whereas tertiary education and foreign innovation show a negative relation. Meanwhile, institutions and ICT have insignificant relationships with economic growth. LSDVc results coincide with GMM results with respect to tertiary education, whereas institutions is the only additional significant and negatively correlated variable with economic growth.

The main limitation of this research lies in the unavailability of proxy data for knowledge economy pillars in monetary terms, and hence, the paper relies on indices.

The novelty of the study lies in its aim to investigate economic growth in the AP region that is enhanced by domestic innovation, foreign innovation or both – an area which is empirically understudied in the knowledge-economy context. Further, the paper’s novelty lies in its application of a comparative empirical analysis between the most popular dynamic panel estimators – dynamic GMM and bias-corrected LSDVc for AP countries.

In this chapter I argue that education cannot escape being influenced by the economic, political and cultural effects of globalization. Through an examination of the policies of national governments, agenda of international organizations such as the World Bank and UNESCO, the global practices of privatization, accountability and managerialism, I demonstrate that education is being used as a tool of neo-liberal economic reform, a process that increases inequalities and marginalizes the already unheard voices. I argue that any analysis of globalization and its impact on higher education requires stepping back from all interactions and practices and asking basic questions about what these terms imply, why they function the way they do, and whose interests they serve. A critical analysis of the transformation of universities and thus the knowledge produced is essential as it affects and infiltrates our very consciousness. I argue that while higher education is being restructured under the neo-liberal economic rationality it is important for educators to find out what will be gained and what will be lost before going ahead with such restructuring. I also contend that the neo-liberal economic rationality of globalization has framed the restructuring of education in such a manner that its function has changed from production of knowledge to production and management of wealth. As a result of accepting the dominant discourse of the globalization agenda without much critical analysis or debate regarding its consequences, education has lost its basic function of producing democratic citizens.

This paper aims to analyse contrasting discourses on education and competitiveness from four countries to show the different national values that are a key driver in economic development.

The paper uses content analysis to compare and contrast the newspaper discourse surrounding the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in four countries with above OECD average performance: Japan and South Korea (improving performance) and Australia and Finland (declining performance). PISA has attracted much government and public attention because it reflects education and the economic value of that education.

There are key contrasts in the discourses of the four countries. Despite shifts to globalised perspectives on education, strong national and cultural differences remain. Educational competitiveness and economic competitiveness are strong discourses in Japan and South Korea, while in Australia and Finland, the focus is on educational competitiveness. The media in Finland has few references to economic competitiveness and it does not feature in Australia. The discourse themes on PISA from 2001 to 2015 are presented with trends in educational attainment and shifting national perspectives on education.

Analysis is limited to the top two circulation newspapers in English language in each country over 2001 to 2015. These newspapers in Finland, Japan and South Korea include translated content from local language papers.

The paper provides longitudinal perspectives to understand the contrasting societal values placed on education and how these relate to perspectives on competitiveness. This media evidence on national discourses can inform education policy orientations in the four countries examined.

Economics classrooms are typically teacher-centered, textbook-driven, and often dominated by chalk-and-talk methodology. This paper advocates for an active learning approach and offers a lesson plan for key concepts. More specifically this lesson uses the economic concept of job market signaling to teach important economic content. Job market signaling is a process that matches workers and employers within labor markets. It occurs when potential employees convey information about their productivity to employers through academic credentials. An academic credential—for example, a college degree—conveys information valuable to both parties. It benefits the employer by indicating job skills and productivity; it benefits the employee because it increases the likelihood of gaining employment at higher wages. Earning academic credentials, thus, is important for success in the labor market. For this reason, it is a useful concept to teach students. By participating in a simulated competitive labor market as employers and potential employees, students learn about the links between education, productivity, income, and employment. As potential employees in this exercise have varying levels of education, this lesson also conveys important information for students concerning their own decisions about pursuing post-secondary education.

The primary purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of educational attainment on crime rates across 33 Indian states over the period 2001 to 2013. This paper also examines the role of various macroeconomic, socio-economic and demographic factors in determining the variation of crimes in India.

First, this paper provides a representative theoretical model and discusses the possible relationship between crime and education. Second, the paper applies a dynamic panel data (DPD) model to extract more precise, unbiased and reliable estimates of the effect of education in abating different crime rates. The main advantage of using the dynamic panel model is to address the problem of endogeneity in some regressors and capture the time persistent effect of education on crime.

Empirical findings reveal that a 1% increase in gross enrolment ratio leads to the reduction of total crime by 8%. However, a unique finding identifies a positive association between tertiary education and economic crime. This finding further goes against the general belief that criminals tend to be less educated than non-criminals.

This paper recommends that instead of punishment and mandatory law enforcement for offenders, increase in government expenditure and different educational attainment ratios can go a long way to combat crime in India, which has posed a serious threat to the stability of society. Furthermore, utilizing the information on offenders' educational attainment in examining the crime rates can be a future research agenda for policymakers.

This study contributes to the empirical debate of ‘crime-education nexus’ by examining the role of education on crime in India. This study is the first of its kind that focuses on the aspects of crime and education more recently and investigates the relationship between crime and education due to the recent changes in educational attainment ratios and crime rate.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between research publications and economic growth – using time-series data from South Africa. The paper attempts to answer two critical questions: is there a long-run relationship between research publications and economic growth in South Africa? Do research publications from South African researchers Granger-cause economic growth?

Unlike some of the previous studies, the current paper uses a trivariate ECM-based Granger-causality model to examine this linkage. Specifically, the study incorporates education as an intermittent variable between research and economic growth. In addition, the paper uses the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL)-bounds testing procedure, which has numerous advantages, especially when the sample size is small.

The results of this study show that there is a long-run relationship between research publications and economic growth in South Africa. The results also show that there is a distinct causal flow from research publications to economic growth in South Africa. This applies both in the short-run and in the long-run. Other results also show that: there is a short-run bidirectional causality between research publications and education; and there is a short-run bi-directional causality between education and economic growth, but a long-run unidirectional causal flow from education to economic growth.

The findings of this paper underscore the crucial role that research plays in economic growth and development. Overall, the findings of this study show that research in South Africa is pro-growth. This implies that the recent significant increase in government expenditure on research and innovation, which is aimed at increasing the country’s scientific research outputs, is likely to pay off.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first of its kind to examine in detail the dynamic causal relationship between research outputs and economic growth in South Africa – using the recently developed ARDL-bounds testing approach within a trivariate setting.

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between institutions and economic growth in developing countries, considering the role of financial inclusion, education spending and military spending.

The study employs dynamic panel analysis, specifically two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM), on a sample of 61 developing countries over the period 2009–2020.

The results confirm that weak institutional quality, weak financial inclusion and increased military spending are barriers to economic growth, conversely, increased spending on education and gross capital formation contribute to economic growth in developing countries. Regarding the specific institutional factor, we find that corruption, ineffective government, voice and accountability and weak rule of law contribute negatively to growth.

The study calls for strengthening institutions so that the financial system supports economic growth and suggests increasing spending on education to improve access to and the quality of human capital, which is an important determinant of economic growth.

The study contributes to scarce literature by empirically analyzing the relationship between institutions and economic growth by considering the role of financial inclusion, public spending on education and military spending, factors that have been ignored in previous studies. In addition, the study identifies the institutional dimension that contributes to reduced economic growth in developing countries.

This chapter highlights why, with the current situation in a VUCA world, governments should consider to ‘leave alone’ the educational policy for the prosperity of special education. One possible way is that governments should let the ‘economic invisible hand’ take on the arrangement of inclusive education and proceed without interference to induce educational competition and the effectiveness of inclusive education.