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 Long Term Educational Cost of War: Evidence from Landmine Contamination in Cambodia

The economic impact of war may be visible in the long run and particularly through its impact on human capital. This paper uses unique district level data on landmine contamination intensity in Cambodia combined with survey data on individuals to evaluate the long-run impact of Cambodia's 30 years of war (1970–1998) on education levels and earnings. These effects are identified using difference-in-differences (DD) and instrumental variables (IV) estimators. In the DD framework I exploit two sources of variation in an individual's exposure to the conflict: age in 1970 and landmine contamination intensity in the district of residence. The IV specification uses the distance to the Thai border as an exogenous source of variation in landmine contamination intensity. The most conservative result indicates that individuals who were too young to have attended school before the start of the war received on average 0.5 less years of education. And, immediately after the war there was no visible effect on earnings. The effects are therefore overall weak. I argue that the destruction of physical capital may be what contributes to drive down the returns to education in Cambodia post-war. The estimates reported may be very conservative due to both error in our measure of conflict intensity and possible selection bias in the placement of prosperous regions.     

The Impact of Adult Mortality and Parental Deaths on Primary Schooling in North-Western Tanzania

Mortality of parents and other adults due to the African AIDS epidemic could reduce children's primary schooling by reducing households' ability to pay fees, raising the opportunity cost of children's time, and leaving orphaned children with guardians who care less about their education than would their parents. This study measures the impact of adult deaths and orphan status on primary school attendance and hours spent at school using a panel household survey from north-western Tanzania, an area hard-hit by the AIDS epidemic. Attendance was delayed for maternal orphans and children in poor households with a recent adult death; there was no evidence that children 7-14 dropped out of primary school due to orphan status or adult deaths. However, among children already attending, school hours were significantly lower in the months prior to an adult death in the household and seemed to recover following the death. In addition, girls sharply reduced their hours in school immediately after losing a parent. Improvements in school quality and better access to secondary education would improve outcomes for all children, including those affected by adult AIDS mortality. Beyond that, public policy needs to focus on the special schooling constraints faced by children affected by adult deaths, both in terms of increased opportunity costs of their time and the psychological impacts, with an eye to how they might be mitigated and at what cost.     

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).     

The Effectiveness of Inputs in Primary Education: Insights from Recent Student Surveys for Sub-Saharan Africa

With SACMEQ and PASEC there are now two large data bases available on student achievement, socio-economic background and school and teacher characteristics in both anglophone and francophone sub-Saharan Africa. A joint analysis of PASEC and SACMEQ in a common education production function framework allows us to estimate the impact of educational inputs on student achievement in 21 sub-Saharan African countries and to compare our results with those of earlier empirical studies for education systems in Africa and other world regions. In our analysis we focus on school equipment, teacher quality and class organisation. The issue of teacher and student incentives cannot be adequately addressed with the given data. Our results are based on a traditional retrospective analysis of student achievement in PASEC and SACMEQ countries. In contrast to the ‘nothing works’ result from most industrialized countries' studies we find robust positive correlations of achievement test scores and the possession of textbooks and negative correlations with teaching in shifts. The most striking result is the weak or even absent correlation of achievement test scores and teacher education and professional training. However, some differences between francophone and anglophone education systems can be observed in this context if differences in the sampling methodology are duly taken into account.     

Public Investments in Education and Children’s Academic Achievements

While the benefits of additional schooling in the developing world are widely recognised, the best use of scarce resources to improve academic achievement remains unclear. We compare public investments in school infrastructure, school improvement grants, teacher qualifications, and attendance incentives on independently-gathered measures of academic skills as well as grade progression for 8–11 year olds in India. We match a rich household survey containing a skills-assessment module, the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), with detailed measures of each district’s education resources from the District Information Survey on Education (DISE). We also include border-pair fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that incentives for children to attend school were associated with arithmetic, reading and writing skills, and grade progression. Investment in teachers were associated with greater probability a child could write and do more advanced math. Small improvement grants to schools were associated with better reading skills and writing ability. Investments in school infrastructure were only associated with improved writing ability.     

The Impact of Daycare Attendance on Math Test Scores for a Cohort of Fourth Graders in Brazil

We estimate the impact of having attended centre-based daycare institutions during early childhood on math test scores at the fourth grade level of elementary school. We find evidence that daycare attendance has a net impact on math proficiency, and that the effects are heterogeneous. The effect of daycare and kindergarten attendance on proficiency varies according to mother’s education. The effects of the impact of daycare vary from ?0.28 standard deviation for mothers with no education to 0.42 standard deviation for mother’s with college or more.     

Teachers’ nascent praxes of care: potentially decolonizing approaches to school violence in Trinidad

Zero tolerance, punitive, and more negative peace-oriented approaches dominate school violence interventions, despite research indicating that comprehensive approaches are more sustainable. In this article, I use data from a longitudinal case study at a Trinidadian secondary school to focus on the role of teachers and their impact on school violence; I show that institutional constraints are not fully deterministic, as teachers sometimes deploy their agency to efficacious ends. In combining Noddings’ postulations on care and Freire’s notions of praxis as a symbiosis of reflection and action, I explicate the nascent praxes of care of six teachers at this school, as they strive for more positive peace-oriented approaches to school violence. I characterize these praxes as nascent because they are not fully interrogative of the structural violence of the entire system. However, I do argue that these nascent praxes possess decolonizing and transgressive potentiality in the face of a logic of coloniality that reinforces hierarchy, exclusion, and marginalization in the Trinidadian educational system. I conclude by contending that these nascent praxes must be scaled-up to more mature, radical praxes, including the cultivation of a systemic praxis of care; in other words, a deeper and broader postcolonial peace education.     

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.     

From the Executive Board to the Classroom. What Debt Relief Means for Education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

ABSTRACT

This analysis re-assesses the IMF’s decision to grant debt relief to the DRC in 2010 based on the country’s poverty reduction and growth performance: would the IMF come to the same conclusion given the current knowledge available about the impact of the debt relief process on public governance and service delivery? First, it shows that, whereas the direct resource effect of this aid modality was minimal, the indirect effect was more significant: the conditionalities attached to the process helped to stabilize the economy and increased the overall budget of the Congolese state. This increased resource availability also sustainably percolated to the education sector. Second, however, the impact on social development was minimal: school enrolment increased but was hardly accompanied by extra budget per pupil, whereas more complicated challenges like disparities in access or quality of schooling were left untouched. The government’s strategy was also partly short-circuited by the electoral process.     

Fertility,family planning,and development: Indirect influences

This paper focuses on the indirect influences on changing fertility and on the direct and indirect influences on family planning effort. Complete data on the variables under consideration were gathered from a variety of sources for 65 developing countries. The results here should be generalized only to high fertility, high mortality, low education, and low per capita gross national product nations. 1) Some social variables, like education, are more important than others for explaining fertility and family planning effort. The treatment of social setting as a single variable obscures the importance of lower level education (literacy, primary, and secondary school enrollment) for fertility and family planning. 2) Ignoring the indirect influences on fertility may lead us to understimate the importance of some variables on fertility, and perhaps to overestimate the importance of others. When both direct and indirect effects (the latter through family planning effort) are examined, the impact of education increases to nearly equal that of family planning effort in 3 of the 4 models developed here. 3) Program effort can be explained at least as well with a single variable (literacy or female school enrollment) as with the composite variable "social setting." 4) In addition to its importance in explaining fertility, education may also be important in explaining mortality. 5) It appears that the absolute and relative status of women may be an important variable which has not yet been adequately measured. Overall, the results of this study lend additional support to the position that, in addition to family planning effort, education may play a more crucial role than is obvious in fertility reduction in developing countries.     

The Heterogeneous Effects of a Food Price Crisis on Child School Enrolment and Labour: Evidence from Pakistan

Using a panel survey, this paper investigates how food price increases in Pakistan in 2008–2010 affect children’s school enrolment and labour. The causal identification relies on the geographical variations in food (wheat) price. The results show that the negative impacts of food price increase on school enrolment differ by gender, economic status and the presence of siblings. The negative effects on school do not directly correspond to the increase in child labour because the transition from being idle to labour activity or from school to being idle is significant, particularly among poor girls. The results also show that children in households with access to agricultural lands are not affected by higher food prices. The analyses reveal a more dynamic picture of the impact of food price increase on child status and contribute to broader policy discussion to mitigate the impact of crises on child education.     

TOWARDS STANDARDS FOR THE PUBLICATION OF PERFORMANCE INDICATORS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: THE CASE OF SCHOOLS

Since the 1990s, the media and public authorities in many developed countries have published data on the quality of public services such as schools, hospitals and police. In the education sector the publication of performance indicators and league tables generated considerable debate. In this article, the policy context of this development in the education sector is analysed in conjunction with the problems associated with the public reporting of school performance indicators. This is followed by a discussion of the need for an accepted set of publication standards. The aim of this article is to initiate a debate about whether international consensus can be reached on the content of such a set of standards, and whether a particular set of standards, developed in the Dutch context, is applicable in and relevant to other countries. These Dutch standards have been applied to a variety of English, American and Dutch publications. The results of the analysis suggest that if the Dutch standards were applied, school performance publications could be significantly improved.     

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.     

An Empirical Investigation of the Factors Affecting the Use of Social Networks in Human Resources Recruitment

ABSTRACT

The main objective of this study is to investigate the factors affecting the use of social networks towards recruiting human resources for organizations. Through an in-depth review of the relevant literature, a questionnaire was designed and distributed among the sample and collected data were analyzed using PLS-Software. Results revealed that 50?75% of organizations use social networks in their organizations and all the identified effective factors in the use of social networks for human resources recruitment were confirmed, except for “hope for performance”. “Facilitating conditions” have the highest impact on the usage of social networks in recruiting, “Social influence” identified as one of the most important factors in people’s behavioral intention for the usage of social networks in recruitment and “Effort expectancy” had the least impact on behavioral intention. In addition, Gender and the level of education have no impact on the behavioral intention and the behavior of usage of social networking.     

Education and Household Inequality Change: A Decomposition Analysis for India

Rising returns to education have increased wage inequality in many developing countries, but their impact on inequality between households is less clear. This study asks how education contributed to household inequality in India during the period 1993–2004, using a regression based decomposition method. We find that rising returns to education of employees did not increase household inequality, because many household heads are self-employed. Instead, rising inequality in education contributed to higher inequality, partly because fertility declined more slowly among illiterates. These new insights into the education-inequality relationship in India underline the importance of household-level analysis to complement earnings inequality research.     

An Assessment of the Impacts of Sri Lanka’s Programme for School Improvement and School Report Card Programme on Students’ Academic Progress

Abstract

This paper examines two education programmes in Sri Lanka: the Programme for School Improvement (PSI), which decentralises decision-making power, and the School Report Card Programme (SRCP), which was designed to provide parents and other community members with information on the characteristics and performance of their local schools. Using a difference in differences identification strategy, it finds the following results. First, the PSI programme significantly increased Math and English reading test scores among Grade 4 students, but not first language (Sinhalese or Tamil) test scores. However, PSI has had no effect on any test scores of Grade 8 students. In contrast, the SRCP had no significant impacts on any test scores in either grade, and further inquiries revealed that the SRCP was never really implemented. Second, the paper examined the impact of both programmes on teacher and school principal variables. Overall, few effects were found, and in some cases effects were found that one would associate with reduced school quality. On a more positive note, the PSI programme does appear to have led schools to form School Development Committees (SDCs), as the programme stipulates, to establish a list of school priorities and to implement projects funded through local fundraising.     

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.     

The Effects of Improved Roads on Wages and Employment: Evidence from Rural Labour Markets in Indonesia

This paper examines the impact of road quality on labour supply and wages using household panel data from rural Indonesia. The analysis uses fixed-effect instrumental variable estimation by first differencing two-round panel data. First, road projects are found to increase the transportation speed. Second, the empirical results from intra-village variations of household endowments and labour-market behaviour show that an increase in transportation speed raised wages in both non-agricultural and agricultural employment, and was associated with a decline in working time in agricultural employment, for the households whose members are relatively educated. The findings support potential complementarity between road quality and education, implying that the government’s public investments in roads and education should be coordinated to capture cross-augmenting positive impacts in the long run.     

Development policy and the evaluation of community self-help: The harambee school movement in Kenya

This attempt to objectively assess the costs and benefits of involvement in the harambee education movement for individuals and families is directed at policymakers and is an exercise in policy analysis. Evaluative studies of this nature are essential to the improvement of the of the overall quality of policymaking. Despite general agreement that harambee education projects involving secondary schools differ in many ways from types of self-help projects, few attempts have been made to assess the long-term social impact of the harambee education movement. For nearly 2 decades Kenya's harambee movement has flourished and has been largely viewed as a positive contribution to national development. Between 1969-79, the total value of contributions to self-help projects rose from around $6 million to almost $27 million, demostrating the substantial inputs of local communities to the economic growth of the country as a whole. Policymakers, after initial reservations about independent self-help, in recent years have come to rely on such activities as complementary to the government's efforts. Self-help activities aimed at expanding educational opportunity are the most significant in terms of both monetary resources expended and the scope of human involvement. Benefits are difficult to extimate. The growing number of students in harambee schools does not necessarly indicate that the majority of these students are acquiring marketable skills or that their consequent levels of academic training will prepare them to complete successfully in the job market with the average student educated in government-sponsored schools. The evidence, in fact, clearly points in the opposite direction. Yet, politicians, policymakers, and citizens continue to regard harambee activities for expanding educational opportunities atall levels as necessary contributions to Kenya's development program and to individual achievement. The direct cost to government for harambee education can be compared with the direct private expenditure on this type of ecucation. The 1976 annual private investment in harambee education was $45 million. The most direct benefits from harambee efforts are reaped by wealthier regions and communities in Kenya. The greaes social benefits derived from the government's policy toward the harambee school movement are political benefits. By symbolically drawing linkages between its national development strategy and independent self-help activities, the government can elicit the tacit support of rural communities. Direct social costs of such a policy are minimal. The indirect, long-term costs may result in disastrous, unintended consequences as the pool of educated and unemployed youths expands and as resulting ethnic and class inequalities sharpen and crystallize.