A Review of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education in India

It is evidenced that country which has a large number of the educated and skilled labour force has a higher potential to lead others in economic development. So, it can be said that the education increases the productivity of the population in general and of the labour force in particular, leading to increase in individual earnings or wages and as a result, contributing to economic growth. Secondary and higher secondary educated population as a labour force are trainable and adjusted as the requirements of the world-wide market. Secondary education now is the single largest provider of working people in all spheres of national productivity. This paper highlights the growth of secondary and higher secondary education of the country and examines the current problems and challenges related to secondary educational system in India. It has been found that the total number of students enrolled in and gross enrolment ratio of secondary education and higher secondary education reflect increasing trends over the period. It is found that there has been an improvement in gender parity, particularly at concerned education level shown by GPI. Although, the progress has been made in the secondary and higher secondary sector of education, the rate of progress does not correspond with the pace of requirement.

Nutritional Status of Adolescent Girls in Corporation Schools in India: Still the Goal is Far Ahead

Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the incidence of malnutrition, as rapid growth takes place in this phase of life. Malnutrition, especially among adolescent girls, adversely affects future generations and indirectly impedes national productivity. Maternal malnutrition also contributes significantly to maternal mortality. It is required to be reduced to 70 per lac live births in 2030 from 167 per lac live births in 2013 to achieve sustainable development goals. The other crucial sustainable development goal is improvement in nutritional status in all phases of life. In the present study, we assessed the healthy situation by Body mass index and Haemoglobin estimation of adolescent girls incorporation school located at Pimpri, Pune, India. Most of the girls belonged to lower-middle to middle socioeconomic status. 67.9% of AGs under study were malnourished, while 8.6% were overweight. Only 3.5% of them had Haemoglobin in the normal range, 1% had severe, 65% of adolescent girls understudy had moderate anemia, and the rest had mild anemia. Results of the study show that India is still far away from attaining Sustainable development goals regarding the nutrition of adolescent girls and will have to take great efforts by existing program evaluation, modification, and strict implementation.

Entrepreneurship and agriculture resources on national productivity in Africa: exploring for complementarities, synergies and thresholds

Purpose Existent literature suggests that Africa is heavily endowed with agriculture resources and entrepreneurship remains an important mechanism for promoting national productivity and other economic outcomes. Despite these, empirical evidence on how agriculture resources promote the effect of entrepreneurship on national productivity in Africa is nonexistent given the abundance of agriculture resources and the need for Africa to increase its productivity, which has implications for improving welfare. Hence, this study aims to examine the interplay of how agriculture resources and entrepreneurship influence national productivity by way of exploring for threshold and complementarity effects of agriculture resources in Africa. Design/methodology/approach This uses panel data of 29 Africa economies between 2006 and 2016 in a bootstrap quantile regression model. Findings First, it is reported that initial levels of agriculture resources in the form of crop and arable lands reduce national productivity while the extreme increase in agriculture resources promotes national productivity in Africa. This implies a nonlinear direct U-shape effect of agriculture resources on national productivity indicating that the enhancing effect of agriculture resources on national productivity is only achieved beyond a certain threshold of average agriculture resources. Second, agriculture resources complement entrepreneurship (which initially reduced national productivity) to promote national productivity. This implies that there is a synergetic-complementarity relationship between entrepreneurship and agriculture resources on national productivity. Practical implications These findings suggest that governments that are interested in boosting national productivity through agriculture resources may have to commit more financial resources to develop and reclaiming more agriculture resources (in the form of crop and arable lands) given that some threshold of agriculture resources are needed to promote national productivity. Similarly, developing agriculture resources by policymakers can help complement entrepreneurship to further improve the effects of entrepreneurship on national productivity. Originality/value This study attempts to present first-time evidence on the interplay between agriculture resources and entrepreneurship on national productivity by way of exploring for threshold and complementarity effects of agriculture resources in Africa.

The Vocational High School in the framework of Revitalization in Indonesian

Indonesian demographic premium with profile of productive age dominated by general high school graduates negatively affects national productivity levels. As an institution that produces skilled labour, vocational schools should be an institution that is expected to be a solution to increase labour productivity. As a government strategy to overcome these problems, the Presidential Instruction No. 09 of 2016 to revitalise the vocational school aimed at improving the competence of Vocational High School graduates. The study uses a mixed method with document analysis, interviews and also questionnaires, the results of this study explain that the Vocational High School in Indonesian does not meet the standard of the industry. From the results obtained, it can be concluded that this study is in line with the expected results.

Technology Development, Net Exports and National Productivity

This study aims to understand the development of technology, net exports, and national productivity. This study uses secondary data from world banks and processed regression using the moving average autoregression method. We find that technology is positively related to gross domestic product and net exports is negatively related to the gross domestic product which is an indicator of national productivity. Based on the estimation, technology development or technology investment in Indonesia tends to be import-based so that it suppresses net exports and results in a decrease in net exports in line with technology development, even though technology investment in the form of high technology development encourages economic growth.

The Development of Cellular Automata-based Entrepreneurial Growth Simulator

Entrepreneurship plays an essential role in the economic growth of a country. These roles include creating jobs, reducing unemployment, increasing people's income, combining production factors (nature, labor, capital, and expertise), and increasing national productivity. For the economy to thrive and healthy, it requires at least 4% of the population who work as entrepreneurs. Due to this vital role, entrepreneurial growth must be maintained. One of the efforts to do this is by monitoring growth directly and continuously. Besides that, another way is to do a simulation. By knowing the condition of entrepreneurship at one time and all the factors that affect entrepreneurial growth, simulations can be carried out to determine or predict future conditions. Based on this simulation, essential steps can be taken, or policies can be made to maintain profitable entrepreneurial growth. This paper presents a mathematical model that can simulate and visualize entrepreneurship's growth in six provinces of Sumatra Island, Indonesia. This mathematical model uses cellular automata as its basis and is called Entrepreneurial Cellular Automata (ECA). One of the advantages of Cellular Automata is that it is easy to visualize. The entrepreneurial model used as a reference is a model from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring (GEM). This mathematical model has been implemented in a simulator program. This paper describes the simulator development and the use of simulator to simulate and visualize the entrepreneurial growth of the six provinces.

UNIVERSALISATION OF EDUCATION IN ODISHA: A GOVERNMENT INITIATIVE

Education is an important input for empowering people with skill and knowledge and giving them access to productive employment in future. It is an important input as well as output indicators influencing other development indicators of social sector such as health, nutritional status, income, family welfare and others. Both primary and secondary education deserves the highest priority for increasing the competence of the average worker and increasing National productivity. As the provision of universal elementary education is crucial for spreading mass literacy, the provision for secondary education is significant for economic development, modernising social sector and for effective working of democratic institutions. Secondary education serves as a link between the elementary and higher education and plays a very important role in this respect. Since universalisation of elementary education has become a constitutional mandate, it is absolutely essential to push this vision forward to move towards universalisation of secondary education which is already been achieved in a large number of developed countries and several developing countries. The recent focus on secondary education was generated by the 2005 Central Advisory Board of Education Report (2005) and the Rastriya Madhyamik Sikhya Abhiyan (RMSA) initiated in 2009-10 to universalize secondary education by making quality education available, accessible and affordable to all children within the age group of 14-18 years with strong focus on the elements of gender equity and justice. This paper studies the access to an equity and quality in primary and higher secondary education classes (IX-XII) in Odisha and examine some idea for improvements in each. KEYWORDS: Democratic institutions, Initiatives, Literacy, National productivity, Universalisation

EXPRESS: National Culture and the Cyclical Behavior of R&D Expenditure

This article examines the cyclical behavior of business (firm-financed) R&D expenditure at the national level, using a panel of 64 countries spanning about 4 decades. R&D is considerably more volatile than GDP and tends to be procyclical. We adopt the Hofstede framework to investigate systematically cross-national heterogeneity in comovement and volatility of R&D. Similar to prior studies, a higher R&D intensity (R&D expenditure / GDP) is associated with more uncertainty accepting, long-term oriented, and indulgent countries. Notably, R&D behaves less procyclically in more uncertainty accepting, individualistic, long-term oriented, and indulgent countries, and it is less volatile in more masculine, individualistic, long-term oriented, and indulgent countries. That is, a culture with a higher propensity to invest in R&D tends to follow business cycles less closely (i.e., lower comovement) and have more persistent spending over time (i.e., lower volatility). Furthermore, higher comovement or volatility of R&D indeed harms national productivity and innovativeness. Therefore, this research broadens our understanding of the role national culture plays by demonstrating (1) that it affects considerably the cyclical behavior of R&D and (2) that this cyclical behavior is another conduit through which culture influences economic performance.