What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.

From the author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids, a “sweeping yet remarkably accessible” (The Wall Street Journal) analysis that “offers superb, often counterintuitive insights” (The New York Times) to demonstrate how we have gone from an individualistic “I” society to a more communitarian “We” society and then back again, and how we can learn from that experience to become a stronger, more unified nation. Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today’s disarray. In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an “I” society to a “We” society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. Engaging, revelatory, and timely, this is Putnam’s most ambitious work yet, a fitting capstone to a brilliant career.

The book "Issues of Human Resource Management", written by well-known authors, is a result of a teamwork of specialists who have been dealing with the issue of managing human resources in different contexts. The authors from Germany, Spain, Turkey, Slovakia and Romania have submitted results of their current research and have presented important findings that are becoming a starting point for making managers decision so that their businesses can be competitive. You have put your hands on a selection of the best scientific contributions that have been reviewed and now are offering a space for an active debate on partial issues of the given topic. The authors in their work examined also the factors of psychology applied in HRM, the organisation of companies and its impact on human resource management, workers motivation and incentives and investment into human resources development; they searched the field of human resource management in family businesses, the quality of relationship in a workplace and specifics of human resource management in non-governmental organisation.

Introduction -- Concepts and definitions -- Methodological issues -- Implementation and measurement issues -- Satellite account for education and training -- Human capital satellite account: an example for Canada -- Human capital country studies -- Recommendations and further work -- References

Human capital—the knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate over their lives—is a central driver of sustainable growth, poverty reduction, and successful societies. More human capital is associated with higher earnings for people, higher income for countries, and stronger cohesion in societies. Much of the hard-won human capital gains in many economies over the past decade is at risk of being eroded by the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. Urgent action is needed to protect these advances, particularly among the poor and vulnerable. Designing the needed interventions, targeting them to achieve the highest effectiveness, and navigating difficult trade-offs make investing in better measurement of human capital now more important than ever. The Human Capital Index (HCI)—launched in 2018 as part of the Human Capital Project—is an international metric that benchmarks the key components of human capital across economies. The HCI is a global effort to accelerate progress toward a world where all children can achieve their full potential. Measuring the human capital that children born today can expect to attain by their 18th birthdays, the HCI highlights how current health and education outcomes shape the productivity of the next generation of workers and underscores the importance of government and societal investments in human capital. The Human Capital Index 2020 Update: Human Capital in the Time of COVID-19 presents the first update of the HCI, using health and education data available as of March 2020. It documents new evidence on trends, examples of successes, and analytical work on the utilization of human capital. The new data—collected before the global onset of COVID-19—can act as a baseline to track its effects on health and education outcomes. The report highlights how better measurement is essential for policy makers to design effective interventions and target support. In the immediate term, investments in better measurement and data use will guide pandemic containment strategies and support for those who are most affected. In the medium term, better curation and use of administrative, survey, and identification data can guide policy choices in an environment of limited fiscal space and competing priorities. In the longer term, the hope is that economies will be able to do more than simply recover lost ground. Ambitious, evidence-driven policy measures in health, education, and social protection can pave the way for today’s children to surpass the human capital achievements and quality of life of the generations that preceded them.

This book explores the intangible human capital which international migrants bring with them and develop further when working and living abroad, drawing on case studies and original data from Central Europe and Mexico–USA. The book demonstrates that despite the fact that many international migrants might be working in their destination countries at a level below their formal qualifications, or else might be formally unskilled, but with practical non-validated skills, they can still acquire and enhance considerable informal human capital in the form of mind skills, soft skills, maker skills and life skills. The book analyses how migration-impacted informal human capital (MigCap) is acquired and enhanced as a result of international migration and what the opportunity and constraint structures are for their acquisitions and transfers. Adopting a comprehensive perspective, the book investigates how migration-impacted informal human capital is transferred by migrants between localities and areas of human actions and activities. Moving beyond the focus on migration as a source of economic capital, this book demonstrates that learning by observing, communicating and doing with others, embedded in social relations can facilitate the enhancement of intangible human capital among both skilled and unskilled migrants. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, sociology, economics, management and business studies, and other related social science disciplines.