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Taking motivation from South Africa's ranking of 50 out of 50 countries who participated in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study of Grade four learners in 2016, this paper examines the social and economic outcomes of literacy in South Africa.

Using unemployment, income and crime rates as proxies for social and economic outcomes, the effect of literacy is examined by employing the fixed- and random-effects techniques to estimate a panel data covering nine provinces in South Africa from 2008 to 2017.

The results show that literacy rate worsens unemployment but improves crime rate and income per capita across South African provinces.

Policymakers need to consider an expanded view of literacy by extending investments to cover financial and technology literacy in addition to functional literacy to fully maximise the benefits of education.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first empirical assessment of literacy outcomes in South Africa.

Reports on research conducted for the Employment Service into the problems faced by people with literacy difficulties in getting a job – even an unskilled job which would require few or no literacy skills to perform it.

Literacy has been one of the most publicized societal problems of the past decade, and it is likely to continue as such for some time to come. Like many problems of modern society, it involves a variety of educational, social, and economic factors, and will therefore not be easily solved.

Librarians planning for the future and unsure about the place of books in an age dominated by technology and media need evidence to make sound decisions. Library and information science researchers have studied the impact of pleasure reading on individuals but not on society. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness about the benefits of recreational reading for societies and to consider the implications of these findings for libraries.

Examining a wide range of studies by government bodies, intergovernmental agencies and academics, this paper addresses a gap in the library literature by critically evaluating the combined implications of sources not hitherto viewed together.

The more leisure books people read, the more literate they become, and the more prosperous and equitable the society they inhabit.

Librarians should create a more robust culture of reading and play a stronger advocacy role for books in libraries.

No one has yet examined government reports about literacy in relation to studies on the impact of pleasure reading. The implications of this combined research highlight the fact that pleasure reading benefits societies as well as individuals, a finding that has significant implications for the future direction of libraries. Decision-makers who need a robust mandate for book-focused resources and services will find supportive statistical evidence in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake comparative analysis examining the effect of renewable energy production on employment focusing on European and Asian Countries.

The study utilizes panel data from the period 2000 to 2018 and System Generalized Method of Moments (System GMM) for the analysis. This study focuses on 50 European and 40 Asian countries data used for the analysis.

The result of the study indicates that, renewal energy production has positively affected employment in both European and Asian countries. However, the positive effect result of European countries is stronger than that of Asian countries.

The study recommends that, governments among these countries should continue to show strong commitment towards investing in renewable energy production as stated in Paris Agreement (2015). This will have a strong effect towards increasing further employment creation among these countries.

Numerous empirical studies have been carried out examining the effect of renewable energy production on employment. This study contributes to existing empirical studies by undertaking comparative analysis to examine the subject matter focusing on European and Asian countries.

The aim of this chapter is to frame the key issues in workplace information literacy. This chapter is the personal experiences and observations of the author with over 30 years of experience in intranets, corporate libraries and product development. The workplace is not a single or uniform population, as can be said broadly about mass markets like consumers, K-12 students, or undergraduate scholars. Workplaces are defined as the workers in both not-for-profit and for-profit sectors who are tasked with running the organization and delivering services to end users like learners, customers, clients, patients, etc. This chapter explores these issues and frameworks through key target audiences in commercial and institutional workplace environments such as:

• Teachers (as opposed to students)

• Faculty (professors as opposed to young scholars)

• Corporate administrators and business decision-makers, executive, professionals, consultants, accountants, auditors, MBAs, managers

• Medical professionals such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists

• Lawyers (in both private practice and internal corporate and government work)

• Engineers

• Creative professions (artists, advertisers, marketers, etc.)

Teachers (as opposed to students)

Faculty (professors as opposed to young scholars)

Corporate administrators and business decision-makers, executive, professionals, consultants, accountants, auditors, MBAs, managers

Medical professionals such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists

Lawyers (in both private practice and internal corporate and government work)

Engineers

Creative professions (artists, advertisers, marketers, etc.)

The paper offers the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of dynamics of economic growth slowdown for India at the sub-national level covering the period 1993–2013. In light of India’s regional diversity and variation in terms of gross regional domestic product (GRDP) per capita, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the growth dynamics at the sub-national level. The paper aims to answer two questions: first, are determinants of economic slowdown likely to differ across income groups? Second, what are the probabilities that the sub-national economies in India will experience a growth slowdown in the near future?

The paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of growth slowdown for 106 Asian developing economies encompassing the national economies in ASEAN and the sub-national economies in Greater China, Indonesia and India. To be sure, the authors are not making any direct comparison to countries at different stages of economic development; rather, the comparison is between economies/sub-national economies that fall in the same income category. The authors construct income group-specific logistic model to identify the relevant determinants of growth slowdown and use Bayesian model averaging techniques as a robustness check. The authors also compute economy-specific predictive probabilities of growth slowdown over the period 2012–2017.

The empirical results show that a growth slowdown in various income groups tends to be associated with different sets of determinants, although broadly, across all income groups, the occurrence of growth slowdown is positively associated with higher GRDP per capita. The average predictive probability of growth slowdown for India’s sub-national economies is 0.43, indicating that, on average, India’s sub-national economies have a 43 per cent chance of experiencing growth slowdown in the 2012–2017 period. Overall, the prospects of the sub-national economies of India are less worrying than that of Greater Chinese economies but bleaker than the outlook for economies in ASEAN and Indonesia.

The research contributes to the understandings of growth dynamics, especially the issue of growth slowdown, in India. This paper differs from the existing literature on growth dynamics by being India centric and analysing the issue of growth slowdown at the sub-national level. Despite a steady increase in the level of GRDP per capita for the sub-national economies of India since 1993, significant disparities still exist across economies. Identifying determinants of growth slowdown and subsequently computing predictive probabilities serves as early warning signs for policy-makers and generates insights on how development policy can be shaped.

Given the different manifestations of the unemployment crisis, the main purpose of this study was to identify what characteristics influence the participation of youth in key self-employment business options.

The study has used both probability and nonprobability sampling techniques. Purposive sampling methods were used to identify target study areas (districts and Kebeles) while the systematic random sampling method was used to locate sample respondents. A total of 424 sample respondents were interviewed through interview scheduled questionnaires. Statistical data analysis was carried out using STATA 14 software.

Agriculture, local value-added business activities, food-related services, petty trade and local transportation were common business choices where unemployed youths were engaged in. The findings of the study also showed that sex, loan size, loan repayment period and training gap were predictors of youth engagement in various self-employment career choices.

Increasing loan size has a positive and significant influence on youth engagement in all self-employment business choices and has reminded us the need to revise or lift up loan size celling to assist youths in engaging in productive sectors. Similarly, the favourable correlation between female youths and value-added activities necessitates a well-designed female-specific intervention.

An understanding of the key determinants of youth preference to engage in specific self-employment career choices enables practitioners to intervene where necessary in supporting youth self-employment engagement. A combination of skill training, relaxed loan size and relaxed repayment is likely to gain sustainable business, which would benefit the local economy by transforming small businesses to a higher level and creating more job opportunities.

In a country that is marred by an excessively high unemployment rate, there is a need for policymakers to prioritise entrepreneurship in South Africa. The study aims to explore the determinants of self-employment among the youth in South Africa and in the process answer the following question: Who are the self-employed youths in South Africa?

Different potential predictors of self-employment empirically used in the literature were used in this study. A probit regression model was used with the binary self-employment variable as the dependent variable and a host of independent variables. A nationally representative survey consisting of youths was used in the analysis.

The findings show that financial literacy increases the odds of being self-employed. Secondly, the odds of being self-employed increase with age as mature people are expected to have gathered enough networks and wisdom over the years. Thirdly, being male decreases the odds of being self-employed. When it comes to education, the only category that statistically increases the odds of being self-employed compared with no schooling is the tertiary level of education. The other educational levels are all statistically insignificant. From a policy perspective, the government should promote self-employment by investing in financial literacy as well as increasing access to tertiary education among disadvantaged groups.

The study is one of the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to examine the characteristics of the self-employed using a nationally representative survey in South Africa.

The main aim of this paper is to test the ways in which the role of high‐technology services (HTS) in the economy of European Union (EU) member countries changes and the extent to which the development of HTS depends on the quality of human resources.

The paper adopts comparative and cluster analysis of statistical data published by Eurostat.

The empirical analysis approved the growing proportion of HTS in both employment and gross value added in the EU as a whole. However, there are great differences among individual member states that can be grouped into four clusters. HTS have a significantly higher proportion of tertiary educated employees, belong to young sectors and show a higher rate of participation in continuing education. HTS development is closely related to information communications technology (ICT) literacy of the population of the country, on the one hand, and on its economic standards, on the other.

The major findings constitute a starting‐point for more thorough national analysis and for setting measures supporting HTS development, especially through the availability of an appropriately educated labour force.

The growing proportion of HTS in the economy is an important feature of knowledge economies; therefore it is necessary for politicians to have information about the development of this sector.

HTS has been little researched in a detailed way to date. This paper tries to indicate all the important features that should be further and more deeply analysed.