Discussion Papers / Zentrum für Internationale Entwicklungs- und Umweltforschung (ZEU)
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URN: urn:nbn:de:hebis:26-opus-13753
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Item Advertisements or friends? : Formal and informal recruitment methods in Tanzania(2009) Egbert, Henrik; Fischer, Gundula; Bredl, SebastianThe findings of our study in Mwanza can be interpreted on two different levels. Firstly, they can be read in the light of actors and managers who take decisions in a specific micro-setting influenced, e.g., by the legal form, the age, the size of their respective company. Secondly, results can be analyzed in connection with the general conditions of the labour market in Tanzania. The latter includes a reflection on how different recruitment methods relate to the make up of the supply side. In what follows we will first focus on the micro-setting and then conclude the paper with thoughts related to the labour market in Tanzania. In contrast to data for industrialized countries our investigation shows that in Tanzania formal methods are more often applied for high-ranking positions. Considering the size and legal form of the companies studied several interpretations are possible. A first interpretation is related to the observation that larger companies are significantly more often registered as limited companies. In limited companies managers are employed. They need to justify their decisions to capital owners. The use of formal recruitment methods - it can be assumed - is a managerial strategy to achieve (at least superficial) transparency in decision-making processes. Thus, the organizational structure of the company may relate to the choice of recruitment methods. In the case of large private companies external accountability is added to internal accountability. Advertising for personnel on a national level and therefore adhering to the rules of equal opportunities (as laid down in the Tanzanian labour law) may influence the public image of the company (and its products) positively. A second interpretation refers to small companies which are significantly more often run as sole proprietorships. In case of bankruptcy owners of these companies (unlike managers) are at risk to be liable with private capital. As a result they must have a vital interest in preserving their company´s existence. The employment of people who are trusted, e.g., friends or kin (cf. Trulsson 1997; Egbert 2001) can be seen as an attempt at reducing the risk of fraud. Moreover, informal recruitment channels may be cheaper for the company (cf. De Soto 1989). In case of less qualified positions they allow to scan and reduce the vast pool of job seekers with low or average education to a manageable group which fits the company requirements. Thus the vacancy period is shortened. If we analyze the results on the macro level we have to ask what we can learn about the make up of the Tanzanian labour market. In our study companies seek to fill highranking positions by newspaper advertisements on the national level. This is anindicator that regional labour markets do not provide sufficient or sufficiently qualified personnel. A lack of well-trained professionals in, e.g., management, IT, health and educational sectors is persistent and due to severe inadequacies in training institutions from the primary up to the tertiary level (United Republic of Tanzania 2000). These inadequacies include, among others, understaffing and low salaries, facilitators who in many cases have not received appropriate training themselves, large classes and insufficient infrastructure and equipment. In spite of government efforts to improve training and the mushrooming of private training institutions, only few graduates enter the job market with acceptable skills and knowledge (see also Byemelwa 2009). The placement of advertisements is thus an attempt to attract more applicants from a small pool which is not accessible by social networks only. Comparing vacancy periods for high- and low-ranking positions the patterns found in Tanzania are similar to those in industrialized countries. High-ranking positions are vacant for a significantly longer period than low-ranking positions. The acceptance of longer vacancy periods for high-ranking positions may be related to what has been revealed in recent fake certificate scandals in Tanzania. In some areas of the labour market (e.g., education) large numbers of applicants gained employment through forged documents. In 2008 the National Examinations Council of Tanzania warned private and public organizations to be wary of forgeries and to screen certificates carefully when hiring staff (Machira 2008). A longer vacancy period could then be the outcome of intensified processes of screening the submitted documents. As a consequence, transaction costs (information, search and screening costs) increase. Linking our results to the labour market discussions initially mentioned, different degrees and forms of segmentation become visible. Mobility between the primary and secondary tier of the labour market seems to be extremely restricted due to low standards at national educational institutions. The lack of well-trained workers in the primary sector weakens the impact social capital could have as a criterion for further segmentation. In the secondary sector, however, the state of being unemployed or employed is frequently determined by who you know. Social networks which often rely on stratifying criteria such as ethnicity, gender and religion contribute to the rise of further divisions within the lower tier. A combination of insights from labour market theory and human resource management prepares the avenue for an understanding of these fragmentations.Item Climate risk management in Central Asian agriculture : A situation analysis(2012) Pawlowski, IraThe region of Central Asia, and in particularly the agricultural sector, is extremely vulnerable to climate change risks. The countries have started to develop adaptation strategies and climate risk management strategies, most of them described in the National Communications on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. These and other efforts are presented and commented in this paper.Item Debris flows at the river Mletis Khevi and its assessment methods(2007) Gavardashvili, Givi; Schäfer, Michael; King, LorenzItem Determinants of foreign direct investment of OECD countries 1991-2001(2005) Gast, MichaelUsing a fixed-effects panel data approach, FDI flows of 22 OECD countries are explained by gravity equations over the period 1991-2001. It is distinguished between all available observations, Intra-EU25 observations only, and observations not belonging to the EU25 area in order to control for EU-specific effects. Regressions are repeated with exports as dependent variable in order to capture diverging influences for trade flows. Changes in total market size and relative market size are important factors that lead both FDI and exports in the same direction. However, relative market size is only significant in the FDI equation when variation between the EU25 area and other investment is taken into account, thus indicating a concentration of FDI within Western and Central Europe. Stock market booms boost FDI but not exports. Differences in significance levels/signs of coefficients of political indicators and exchange rate changes indicate that exports are demand-driven while FDI is supply-driven. Year dummies interacted with country distance show that, overall, FDI and exports tended to flow less to distant countries over the period under consideration. However, this trend is reversed for exports within the EU25 area.Item Different background - similar strategies : recruitment in Tanzanian-African and Tanzanian-Asian companies(2010) Egbert, Henrik; Fischer, Gundula; Bredl, SebastianThe literature on enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa provides evidence that there are significant differences between companies run by members of the majority population and those run by members of minorities. Differences are frequently related to size, age, and certain success indicators. However, it remains unclear whether decisions concerning the acquisition of personnel also diverge. This paper outlines results of a questionnaire survey on recruitment methods of enterprises in Tanzania. The authors tried to discover differences in the recruitment strategies of Tanzanian-African and Tanzanian-Asian companies but found none. The interpretation is that companies operate in similar business environments and face comparable, exogenously given institutional restrictions. Thus, strategies of personnel recruitment seem to be alike.Item Do German exporters PTM? : Searching for right answers in sugar confectionery exports(2013) Fedoseeva, SvetlanaPricing-to-market (PTM) evidence in German sugar confectionery exports is examined, combining the original fixed-effects model of Knetter (1989) and an errorcorrection specification (ECM) at three frequency levels, to assess how neglecting time-series properties and the choice of frequency affect the outcomes. In order to ensure validity of unit values as price proxies, the type of competition with every destination market is evaluated, proving price-driven competition with Canada, Sweden, the UK and the US, but not with Switzerland. Results show that fixed-effect model findings of PTM might be spurious, if time-series properties of the data are not considered. German exporters seem to exploit their market power and adjust their markups to protect market shares in strategically important expanding destinations. Local currency price stabilization (LCPS) was found for Canada and the UK, while LCPS for the exports to US in fixed-effects model turned out to be an erroneous result, as cointegration was rejected. Data of the higher frequency was suggested to be preferable for PTM studies, once measurement error due to heterogeneity is minimized. Finally, using marginal costs estimates from a fixed-effects model as cost proxies in the ECM improves the quality of the model and reveals a higher degree of PTM.Item Is there a difference? Exchange rate nonlinearities in European agri-food (versus total) exports to the US(2014) Fedoseeva, SvetlanaEach time the Euro starts appreciating, a discussion on how painful this might hit European exporters arises in media, making politician and economists work out the ways to mitigate possible shocks. Still, in his recent study, Verheyen (2013a) using aggregated European exports to the US as an example, showed, that in the long run exports react on exchange rate changes in a nonlinear way. Particularly his analysis revealed, that a positive impact on trade during the Euro depreciation seem to outweigh the losses caused by its appreciations. In this paper, I test whether this holds true for agri-food exports as well. To address this question, I apply a partial sum decomposition approach and the NARDL framework of Shin et al. (2013) to aggregated agri-food exports as well as to total exports of eleven European countries to the US, which is currently the major partner of the EU in agri-food trade. The outcomes suggest, that the exchange rate nonlinearities are even more pronounced in agri-food than in total exports. Despite the ongoing discussion regarding the nocent effect of a strong national currency on exports, the estimation results suggest that European agri-food exporters have found their way to cope with such negative effects. European exporters seem to benefit more from Euro depreciation, than its appreciation harm them. I interpret this finding as a sign of pricing strategies application (e.g., pricing-to-market) to the European agri-food exports.Item Market integration of wheat in Pakistan(2015) Sahito, Jam Ghulam MurtazaItem Multiple Dimensions of Regional Variation of Impoverishment in Iran(2015) Mahoozi, HosniehConcerning the demands of Sen's (1987) Capabilities Approach to assessment of human wellbeing, the paper estimates the values of frequency and breadth of multidimensional poverty in Iran. It distinguishes specific regions as Tehran, other urban areas, and rural areas and it reveals that the proportion of rural areas in multidimensional poverty has increased from 1999 to 2007, in spite of relatively high rate of GDP growth in that period. It also detects the specific socio-economic group s deprivation type which is invaluable information for effective policy targeting.Item Protection mechanisms and services for young workers in Central Asia and the European Union(2010) Kulakhmetova, AnelThe UN Convention on the rights of the child speaks not only about needs but about the rights of children from the moment of a birth. The Convention covers a wide scale of the rights consolidated in three basic categories: - The right to life, - The right for survival and development, - The right for protection and participation. The Convention provisions assume that children should live in the environment providing for realization of their rights starting from the right for a name and citizenship and ending with the medical and sanitary care and education. They have the right to shelter from torture, exploitation, arbitrary detention, and unreasonable deprivation of family care. Children have the right to participate in decisions concerning their lives and to participate in the life of the local community.The Convention is not the hierarchy of the rights and therefore, one right cannot possible have a higher priority in comparison with the other right. The Convention demonstrates that all rights of the child are equally important. Rights complement each other and provide for survival and development of the child. The countries-signatories to the Convention make a commitment to respect and ensure the whole complex of rights stipulated by the Convention for each child within the limits of the state jurisdiction without any discrimination (UN CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD 1989, ARTICLE 2(1)). The state and the family are responsible for guaranteeing, respecting, and realizing the rights of the child. It is widely accepted that the state has a central and a primarily beneficial role in the protection of young people. Therefore, even if children experience extreme abuse or are neglect from their families the state authorities are supposed to provide comfort to those children. In the field of childhood studies there has been plentiful debate about the role of the state in children´s lives. Less attention is given to the ways in which the state is a source of risk for children (BOYDEN 2007, P. 240). The present research tries to show that with an effort to limit the influx of illegal migrants to their own countries many governments fail to realize their obligations towards migrant children. In many cases for reasons of national security they try to limit the rights of the child, putting at stake a notion of childhood as a life phase free from political blemish: in legal terms at least, children are the bearers of rights that cannot be compromised or alienated by circumstance.There are 192 countries of the world ratified the UN Convention on the rights of the child, including five Central Asian states. (ALSTON/TOBIN 2005, P. 10) Having joined the UN CRC, Central Asian countries have undertaken a wide range of obligations requiring serious revision of the current legislation, of the corresponding mechanisms for coordination of the child protection system and monitoring of the rights´ implementation. However, the UN Committee on the rights of the child in the concluding observations to periodic reports provided by the countries marks that there are still a number of problems in this area: - In countries of Central Asia the national legislation does not always fully comply with principles of the UN Convention on the rights of the child; - Lack of necessary financial and human resources, lack of the comprehensive approach in the child protection hinders the work of coordinating structures involved in the child rights protection (UNICEF INNOCENTI RESEARCH CENTER 2006, P. 31). - Lack of the statistical data on children, first of all, about the most vulnerable groups of children, hinders monitoring of the Convention implementation. Due to these existing problems the issues of children especially in need of assistance fall out of the focus of the governments. These children become «invisible» which means that the rights of these children will not be satisfied even at the level of basic needs such as sufficient nutrition, health care, school education and family care. The reasons causing such situations are lack of the data about children in the state agency of statistics, lack of the records about these children during development of the state program, duplication of functions of various departments and ministries.In 2006, countries of Central Asian initiated the Forum on child protection to overcome these problems. Issues of social policy, protection and inclusion of children, creation of the social protection system and overcoming of fragmentation were discussed. The Forum has demonstrated that it is an effective instrument for interstate cooperation and exchange of experience. Hereafter, it can serve as an impulse to conduct the integrated Forums (Forum on education, Forum on maternity and child health, Forum on child protection). The regional analysis of child protection systems shows that there is a fragmentation of the current child care systems. There is a multitude of actors, not necessarily well coordinated that have to respond to complex family situations and different child protection problems. Reforms of current child care systems into a continuum of services that provide individualized responses, rather than collectivist responses is one of the important regional lessons learned to strengthen the current system response. There are many implications for governments in this work: - They must be driving the vision for change and articulate operational plans, guiding principles for the reform as well as targets for the coming years. - Governments also need to be active in enforcing what are the core responsibilities of the state. This includes setting standards for the operation for the system, carry out gate-keeping functions, accreditation, provide support to planning, costing and budgeting at regional and local levels, defining the minimum package of services; and development of targeted social policies to support most vulnerable families - To overcome fragmentation and ensure proper coordination of the work, governments are also responsible for bridging gaps between sectors, coordination and facilitating institutional and professional capacity development. This includes regulate allocation of resources (decentralization with equity), define obligations of the different sectors (including responsibilities of the professionals encompassed in job descriptions), ensure continuum of services between the different actors (includes identifying missing services and functions) and improve professional competencies (job descriptions, training, lessons learned, sharing potential good practices, etc.) - Finally, governments need to take full responsibility for review of quality of services provided through monitoring of services (beyond financial monitoring), development of methods for result-based management, support to systems for data collection, provide opportunities for competition in service provision between state actors and NGOs. Having signed the UN Convention on the rights of the child, the governments of all Central Asian countries have undertaken to respect the rights of children, including the right to the proper standard of living. The governments of Central Asia should be aware of necessity to input funds in development of children because children are the future. Since 1998, the region enjoyed economic growth while the economic recession was left behind. Taking the economic growth into the account as well as reduction of the birth rate, today all Central Asian countries have a unique chance to invest in education and public health for the future of their children. In the long-term prospect these investments will allow the younger generation to make their own investment.Item Wasserressourcen und deren Nutzung im Flussbecken des Tarim (Autonome Region Xinjiang / VR China)(2005) Giese, Ernst; Mamatkanov, D. M.; Wang, RunDie vorliegende Untersuchung wurde im Rahmen der Arbeiten zum Forschungsprojekt: "Wasserverknappung, Wassernutzungskonflikte und Wassermanagement in Trockengebieten Zentralasiens (Usbekistan, Kasachstan, Kirgistan, Xinjiang/VR China)" erstellt. Das Ziel des Forschungsprojektes bestand darin, die Ursachen und Auswirkungen der zunehmenden Wasserverknappung und Verschlechterung der Wasserqualität in den Trockengebieten Zentralasiens zu untersuchen.Item Wasserressourcen und deren Nutzung im Ili-Balchaš Becken(2007) Dostaj, Ž. D.; Giese, Ernst; Hagg, Wilfried