Education,Employment and Earnings of Secondary School and University Leavers in Tanzania: Evidence from a Tracer Study

This study uses a tracer survey of secondary school completers in Tanzania to analyse the impact of educational qualifications on labour market earnings. We show that the rates of return to the highest educational qualifications for wage employees are not negligible and, at the margin, provide an investment incentive. However, we find little evidence of human capital effects in the earnings determination process for the self-employment sector. Introducing controls for father's educational background and a set of school fixed effects designed to proxy for school quality and potential labour market network effects reduces the estimated rates of return to educational qualifications. A comparison of our results with the available evidence from other countries in the region suggest that, despite an extremely small secondary and university education system, the private rates of return to education in the Tanzanian wage employment sector are comparatively low.     

The determinants of earnings among low‐income workers in Bombay: An analysis of panel data

This article estimates the determinants of earnings among workers in low income settlements of Bombay. It uses panel data on workers in two homeless (pavement‐dwelling) communities and two slum communities. The estimated earnings functions, adjusted for community‐ and time‐specific fixed effects, show a good fit. Age and education are significant in all the regressions; however, some of the job‐related variables appear to be more important than the standard human capital variables in determining earnings. In conclusion, while a complex set of factors seem to determine earnings of workers in low‐income communities, institutional factors play an important role.     

Future trends: Some observations

Abstract

As the international system enters a new phase of maturity and optimism, there is growing realization of the unwinnability of nuclear war. There is no doubt about the inconclusiveness of war as an instrument of state policy. The current international strategic environment indicates the emerging significance of low‐intensity conflict (LIC). Although this form of warfare has existed for centuries in its various manifestations, seldom has it been used to better outcome than during the last 40 years. In fact, LIC may euphemistically be referred to as the warfare of the “warfare of the future.” This article examines the emerging nature of low‐intensity conflict and its impact on the social development of Third‐World countries such as India.     

Changes in human capital and earnings inequality: Recent evidence from Brazil 1

Abstract

This paper estimates changes in the rates of return to human capital across the earnings distribution using data from over a 10-year period for Brazil. It uses these estimates to simulate the separate impacts of changes in returns to skills and changes in the supply of skills on earnings inequality. Evidence points strongly to growing inequality in rates of return to education in Brazil. This finding suggests that recent macroeconomic and trade reforms have been of most benefit to the skilled rather than the unskilled. Supporting evidence points to an improved competitiveness in the labour market, with workers increasingly rewarded for productivity. However, although increases in returns to education are more pronounced at the top of the earnings distribution, this did not in practice led to increased inequality. This is because levels of education and other labour market-rewarded endowments have increased and offset the rate of return effect. Appropriate education policy is therefore an essential partner for macroeconomic and trade reform if a developing economy is to avoid worsening income inequality.     

Higher education and economic growth in Africa

This paper uses panel data over the 1960–2000 period, a modified neoclassical growth equation, and a dynamic panel estimator to investigate the effect of higher education human capital on economic growth in African countries. We find that all levels of education human capital, including higher education human capital, have positive and statistically significant effect on the growth rate of per capita income in African counties. Our result differs from those of earlier research that find no significant relationship between higher education human capital and income growth. We estimate the growth elasticity of higher education human capital to be about 0.09, an estimate that is twice as large as the growth impact of physical capital investment. While this is likely to be an overestimate of the growth impact of higher education, it is robust to different specifications and points to the need for African countries to effectively use higher education human capital in growth policies.     

Who Benefits from Higher Education in Low- and Middle-Income Countries?

In this article, we investigate how higher education contributes to the employment and earnings of individuals in labour markets, and whether social origins play a role in the financial benefits from higher education. We focus on these questions in nine low- and middle-income countries: Armenia, Bolivia, Colombia, Georgia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Macedonia, and Vietnam. We use the recent Skills Towards Employability and Productivity (STEP) surveys of urban labour force participants to examine individuals’ educational attainment, labour market participation, and earnings. Using logistic regressions, we find that individuals from disadvantaged origins are less likely to obtain a higher education degree. We find that in most of these countries, individuals who have earned a higher education degree are significantly more likely to be in the labour force and find employment, and enjoy sizable earnings premia. The findings are fairly robust with regard to the samples of individuals examined, and the methods used to measure earnings premia. Finally, we find little evidence that the earnings premia from higher education vary by social origins or the likelihood of an individual completing a degree. These results suggest that the benefits from higher education are comparable for individuals from disadvantaged and advantaged social origins.     

Heterogeneity in returns to schooling: Econometric evidence from Ethiopia

This paper investigates whether returns to schooling in Ethiopia vary across the wage distribution of individuals. To do so, it adopts an instrumental variables quantile regression framework that allows for both endogeneity of schooling resulting from unmeasured ability, and possible heterogeneity in the impact of schooling. The empirical estimates indicate that education contributes more to the earnings of individuals at a lower end of the income distribution.     

Japanese aid to Africa: Patterns,motivation and the role of structural adjustment

This article presents estimates of capital flight from 25 low-income sub-Saharan African countries in the period 1970 to 1996. Capital flight totaled more than $193 billion (in 1996 dollars); with imputed interest earnings, the accumulated stock of flight capital amounts to $285 billion. The combined external debt of these countries stood at $178 billion in 1996. Taking capital flight as a measure of private external assets, and calculating net external assets as private external assets minus public external debts, sub-Saharan Africa thus appears to be a net creditor vis-à-vis the rest of the world.     

Stature,Skills and Adult Life Outcomes: Evidence from Indonesia

We investigate the effect of height on earnings, occupational choices and a subjective measure of wellbeing among Indonesian men. We explore the extent to which height captures the effects of endowments set before entry in the labour market. Physical and cognitive skills, co-determined with stature early in life, do not explain much of the height earnings premium directly. Yet, human capital more broadly, including cognition, educational attainment and other factors related to childhood conditions, explains around half of the height premium and does so through occupational sorting. Indeed, taller workers tend to have more education, and educated workers tend to work in more lucrative occupations that require brain and social skills, not brawn. The unexplained share of the height earnings premium may reflect a specific role of stature on social interaction, labour market advantages or self-assurance. We also find a height premium in happiness, half of which simply accounts for the educational and earnings advantages of taller workers.     

Estimating the Effects of Conflict on Education in Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

This article evaluates the effect of armed conflict on years of schooling in Côte d’Ivoire. We combine differences in conflict intensity across departments and differences across age cohorts to identify an individual’s indirect exposure to conflict. The difference-in-difference outcomes indicate that the average years of education for a school-going-age cohort is 0.94 years fewer compared to an older cohort in conflict-affected regions. We further use a set of victimisation indicators to identify the direct effect of conflict. Overall, the findings across different models suggest a drop in average years of education by a range of 0.2 to 0.9 fewer years. The estimated effect is larger for males and individuals between 19 and 22 years of age.     

Accounting for Changing Earnings Inequality in Costa Rica, 1980–99

After declining from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, inequality in monthly earnings in Costa Rica stabilised from 1987 to 1992 and then increased from 1992 to 1999. In this article, we use recently developed techniques to measure the extent to which these changes in earnings inequality were the result of changes associated with the distributions of personal and workplace characteristics of workers or the earnings differences associated with those characteristics. We present evidence that the most important cause of the fall in inequality prior to 1987 was a decline in returns to education. Inequality stopped falling in Costa Rica in the 1990s in part because returns to education stopped falling. The most important cause of rising inequality in monthly earnings in the 1990s was an increase in the proportion of workers working a non-standard work week (part-time or over-time).     

Crisis,containment and development: the role of the landmine impact survey

This article sets out to explain the Landmine Impact Survey, implemented by the Survey Action Center (sac), which is led by a consortium of mine action organisations. The primary rationale of the survey lies in the need to root mine action priority decisions in a firm understanding of the impact that landmines have upon communities. Data from four countries in which impact surveys have been completed indicate that only a small share of communities—perhaps as few as 10%—can be categorised as high impact, another 25% as medium impact, and the remaining 65% as low impact. This has implications for the prioritisation of scarce mine action resources, but it also makes broad elimination of the impact of landmines within the dates specified by the Landmines Convention appear more realistic, even though total clearance may appear unrealistic. The article places the impact survey initiative in the context of the evolution of a humanitarian response to landmines, from an emerging realisation of the threat in the 1970s and 1980s to the present-day landmine response capacity working with other reconstruction and development initiatives. The success of the sector ultimately hinges on the availability of solid and systematic data on impact.     

Remitting Behaviour of Nepalese Rural-to-Urban Migrants: Implications for Theory and Policy

This article uses data for Nepal to test contemporary hypotheses about the remitting behaviour and associated motives of rural-to-urban migrants and to consider the likely impact of such remittances on rural development. Possibilities for inheritance, degree of family attachment, likelihood of eventual return to place of origin and family investment in the education of the migrants are found to be significant influences on levels of remittances by Nepalese migrants. However, in Nepal, remittances do not seem to result in long-term capital investment in rural areas and so may not promote long-term development of these areas.     

Labour Market Impacts of School Expenditure and Class Size: Evidence from China

This study is a first attempt to estimate the impact of school resources on students’ subsequent labour market earnings in China. Combining unprecedented school data from the early 1950s to the 1990s with household survey data in the 2000s, this paper documents that expenditure-per-pupil, a proxy measure of school resources (or quality) has a significant impact on the level of subsequent earnings through its influence on education returns. The positive effect calls for policy intervention aimed at improving education, to be based on the perceived economic return to the quantity as well as the quality components of education.     

Geography and the outcomes of civil resistance and civil war

This paper reports the results of the first cross-national examination of the impact of the geography of nonviolent contention on regime transitions. Nonviolent tactics ‘work’ in part by signalling the preferences of non-participants through the symbolism of participants, unlike violent tactics. This opens the way for nonviolent campaigns to exploit variations in social-spatial meaning to enhance the informativeness of dissent. Capital cities are one such symbolic place and the main prediction of this study is a positive relationship between large protests and regime transitions in the capital, but not elsewhere. I also predict a strong direct relationship between the proximity to the capital of fighting in civil wars, and regime transitions; no relationship to the proximity of nonviolent contention; and that the intensity of violent conflict impacts regime transitions in a way that is largely independent of location. Results from an analysis of episodes of violent and nonviolent conflict from 1990 to 2014 generally support these contentions.     

Structural and Behavioural Characteristics of Informal Service Employment: Evidence from a Survey in New Delhi

This article argues that at least two distinct categories within the informal sector - informal services and informal manufacturing - exhibit different structural and behavioural characteristics. While some segments of informal manufacturing may indeed be 'dynamic' as noted by some recent studies, the hypothesis is tested for the informal service employment on the basis of a survey by the author in New Delhi, India. It examines investment, earnings, returns to human capital, socio economic characteristics and scope for upward mobility of informal service employment. It finds formal education does not explain differences in earnings in the sample but background characteristics do; earnings in the informal service sector are neither the lowest in the economy nor are they comparable to wages in the urban formal unskilled sector, when differences between migrants and non-migrants are taken into account. On the basis of these results, the paper reflects on the nature of growth and structural change in the Indian economy and draws some analytical and policy implications.     

The coloniality of abridgment: afterlives of mass violence in Cambodia and the US

Abstract

This article examines processes of knowledge production around mass violence in 1970s Cambodia including media reportage and coeval scholarly debate, developing a conceptualisation of colonial abridgment. It assesses operations by which Cambodia as a country is violently essentialised, the occurrence of mass violence taking on metonymic grandeur that works to deny imperial legacies, entomb modern Cambodia in a hermetically sealed past and thereby maintain global order within existing racial-colonial logics.     

Beyond the War on Terror: Into the Fifth Generation of War and Conflict

Fifth generation warfare has arrived and is irreversibly changing the character and nature of human conflict. It confronts the United States with the evolving strategic dilemma of not only dealing with the War on Terror, but of simultaneously crafting strategies that look beyond military preparedness for past wars and embrace the perspective of national preparedness for the spectrum of future conflicts. This article uses four essential elements of war—the new domains of conflict, the changing nature of adversaries, the changing nature of objectives, and the changing nature of force—to build a generational typology of war and conflict that informs the characteristics of fifth generation warfare. The resultant model produces two outcomes: First, it demonstrates how recent events such as the rise of computer hackers, the 2001 anthrax and the 2003–2004 ricin attacks, the 2004 Madrid bombings, and the emergence of Al Qaeda demonstrate characteristics of fifth generation warfare. Second, it illustrates the way in which these events are unique indicators of a future in which non-state entities are increasingly able to wage war on equal footing with nation-states. The article concludes that the United States must embrace fifth generation warfare if it is to successfully confront these threats that have taken on new and heretofore unimagined forms in the postmodern era of war.     

Higher education and peacebuilding – a bridge between communities?

As the Syrian civil war enters its fifth year, with over four million refugees and no solution in the near future, the international community must better consider long-term planning in regards to the plight of refugees and services to support them, not just short-term emergency responses. Critically, higher education is all too often ignored when addressing refugee crises, pushed aside in favor of primary education, and effectively disempowering those best suited to eventually rebuild and reconstruct after war’s end. This paper examines the often less considered aspect of refugee access to higher education, using Duhok, located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as a case study, and hypothesizing that refugees’ inclusion in Duhok’s local higher education system can serve as an invaluable peacebuilding tool, bridging host and refugee communities, while empowering refugees to promote peacebuilding and development. We chose to focus on higher education because we agree with the idea espoused by Watenpaugh, Fricke, and Siegel that ‘university graduates … include Syria’s brightest and most ambitious young people … the human capital that will be critical to the rebuilding of Syrian society after the conflict has ended’. This study investigates Duhok area residents’ perceptions of the Syrian refugee crisis and the refugee population, refugees’ attitudes toward the host community and higher education, and personal views regarding intergroup relationships and the role of higher education, drawing primarily on field research conducted in 2013. Approached as a qualitative study, field research was conducted by a two-person team, with members representing the University of Duhok and New York University, and with the aim of actively working with research participants in the hopes of generating policy-related and practical recommendations.     

Can elite corruption be a legitimate Machiavellian tool in an unruly world? The case of post-conflict Cambodia

Elite corruption may have a significant role in ending conflicts and shaping post-conflict development. This article enquires into the legitimacy accorded to such corruption. It reviews literature on post-conflict Cambodia, seeking evidence that academic commentaries, public opinion or elites themselves regard elite corruption as a legitimate Machiavellian tool for achieving other ends. Corruption has been an element of the style of government adopted by the dominant party in Cambodia, shaping both the achievement of peace and the uneven economic development that followed. Academic commentaries provide some implicit and explicit legitimation of corruption as a means to secure peace and to resist neoliberal policy settings by affording government discretionary resources and power. Meanwhile, public dissatisfaction with elite corruption appears to the most likely source of renewed violent conflict in Cambodia. How elite actors rationalise and legitimise corrupt behaviour remains poorly understood, and is deserving of more attention.