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- All Subjects: economic development
- All Subjects: development
- Creators: Department of Economics
Expectation for college attendance in the United States continues to rise as more jobs require degrees. This study aims to determine how parental expectations affect high school students in their decision to attend college. By examining parental expectations that were placed on current college students prior to and during the application period, we can determine the positive and negative outcomes of these expectations as well as the atmosphere they are creating. To test the hypothesis, an online survey was distributed to current ASU and Barrett, Honors College students regarding their experience with college applications and their parents' influence on their collegiate attendance. A qualitative analysis of the data was conducted in tandem with an analysis of several case studies to determine the results. These data show that parental expectations are having a significant impact on the enrollment of high school students in college programs. With parents placing these expectations on their children, collegiate enrollment will continue to increase. Further studies will be necessary to determine the specific influences these expectations are placing on students.
Focusing on how to improve institutions there needs to be consideration of the fact that institutions have rent seeking behaviors because both local governments and foreign investors want to acquire a greater share of the production and the benefits. In attempt to find some solution of how countries can overcome the Resource Curse without having to totally reconstruct the political system the goal should be to be to focus on actions from the private sector. The private sector tends to magnify rent seeking behavior and to solidify any solution I performed interviews from industry leaders who have been working in economic development for the past decades. The purpose was to understand what companies are doing now to ensure sustainable development and how that has changed over the past decades.
In the end, the private industry is focusing on regulations that standardize polices for companies pursuing foreign direct investment requiring them to also focus on local economic growth and development. This requires foreign investors to understand the local culture, environment, and institutions leading to overall better choices for long term profitably, thus fulfilling their rent seeking tendencies. One of the biggest proven solutions is the Social License to Operate which is essentially an agreement created by the private investor that requires the local community to be informed and holds the investor accountable. In the end, if the private sector can positively impact a community whilst maintaining their own agenda then a country can overcome the Resource Curse.
Due to the sheer amount of macro-economic factors and the case specific incidences involved in the determination of a country’s level of economic development, this thesis will focus entirely on the descriptive analysis of the relationship between a country’s GDP sector composition within the agricultural, industrial, and services sectors and their level of economic development measured in GDP per capita. This study will explore the relationship between GDP per capita and geographic regions, growth over time, and economic size as well. These relationships will be used to determine if said factors need to be controlled for when analyzing the relationship between a country’s sector composition and its level of development. A better understanding of what countries look like at all levels of development helps build a complete picture of a what makes a country successful and could be used in future studies that seek to predict economic success based on more and/or separate variables.
The outlying cities of Phoenix's West Metropolitan experienced rapid growth in the past ten years. This trend is only going to continue with an average expected growth of 449-891% between 2000 and 2035 (ADOT, 2012). Phoenix is not new to growth and has consistently seen swaths of people added to its population. This raises the question of what happened to the people who lived in Phoenix's West Valley during this period of rapid change and growth in their communities? What are their stories and what do their stories reveal about the broader public history of change in Phoenix's West Valley? In consideration of these questions, the community oral histories of eight residents from the West Valley were collected to add historical nuance to the limited archival records available on the area. From this collection, the previous notion of "post-war boomtowns” describing Phoenix’s West Valley was revealed to be highly inaccurate and dismissive of the residents' experiences who lived and formed their lives there.