The learning economy and embodied knowledge flows in Great Britain

This paper examines the `learning economy' from the perspective of occupational characteristics and changes in the British labour market between 1980 and 1992. Following a discussion of the learning and knowledge economy, cross-sectional employment data are analysed to ascertain which occupations can be classified as knowledge-based. Longitudinal career history data are then used to trace the flows of these `knowledge workers' over time. Sectoral shifts are examined, with a particular focus on the knowledge-intensive service sectors. The data come from the Employment in Britain survey: a large-scale employee survey from 1992. The approach used allows us to measure somewhat intangible aspects of economic behaviour such as learning and tacit knowledge and attempt to trace their flows. Shifts in knowledge from the manufacturing to the service sector are shown to be important and related to previous work which demonstrated the importance of knowledge intensive business services for both output and productivity in manufacturing.     

Resource shifts in South African schools after the political transition

Although racial data are no longer available, this article uses a 1997 dataset to compare education spending with the pre-democracy situation. The new government emphasised fiscal resource shifts to eliminate spending discrimination rather than changing educational outcomes. Fiscal resource shifts in education and increased education spending were concentrated in formerly black schools. At the geographic level, non-metropolitan regions gained massively. Yet, as qualified teachers remain scarce in poorer schools, fiscal inequalities have remained, also among black schools. In addition, private resources have considerably supplemented the resources of affluent schools. The large spending shift was mainly a fiscal one (higher teacher salaries in poor schools), although real resource shifts (in pupil/teacher ratios) were not insubstantial. However, poor matriculation results indicate that additional resources, whether fiscal or real, were poorly translated into improved educational outcomes. As equity in education should be measured by equitable educational outcomes rather than equity in educational resource allocation, much work remains to be done.     

Relationship between the mode of land redistribution,tenure security and agricultural credit use in KwaZulu-Natal

Data collected from interviews with new landowners in KwaZulu-Natal in 1999 show that households on four government-assisted projects had less tenure security than households that acquired land via private transactions. Households in government-assisted projects also used less agricultural credit and had less liquidity and less wealth. The probability of households using agricultural credit increased with more secure tenure, more household wealth (number of durable goods), higher liquidity and higher levels of household education. It is recommended that more emphasis be placed on redistributing land through the private market and encouraging the creation of management committees or joint enterprises to utilise the land settled by large groups of beneficiaries. This would be a first step towards making tenure more secure, most notably in the government land reform projects. More secure tenure would improve the creditworthiness of emerging farmers, thereby creating incentives for investing in improvements and complementary inputs to raise agricultural performance.     

Econometrics and inconsistencies in the national accounts

Economic data are typically inconsistent with national accounting identities, contain measurement errors and are sometimes unavailable. A generalized conditioned least square procedure for the adjustment of data is proposed to deal with these problems. It is shown how the resulting data may be used for FIML estimation of the parameters of dynamic models (and the data themselves) with the aid of the Kalman-Bucy filter. An illustrative application of the proposed techniques to UK data is reported.     

STOCK MARKET SEASONALITY AND TAXES: AN EXAMINATION OF THE TAX-LOSS SELLING HYPOTHESIS

Recent empirical studies have found evidence that supports the tax loss selling explanation of seasonal effects in stock returns. Using other test procedures, the present authors conclude that the support found in other studies is likely to be the result of spurious correlation between returns of stocks selected as tax-loss selling candidates and the January returns of these stocks.