This volume contains original research articles which analyze the linkages between education and skills and the causes and consequences of different types of skill mismatch. The volume yields new insights regarding overeducation, underskilling, graduate jobs, wages returns to skills, aggregate productivity, job complexity and skill development.
As developing and transition economies enter the next phase of reforms, labor market issues increasingly come to the fore. With the increased competition from globalization, the discussion is shifting to the need for greater labor market flexibility and the creation of "good" jobs. Moreover, the greater actual and perceived insecurity in labor markets has generated a new agenda on how to structure safety nets and labor market regulation. The older questions of the links between the formal and informal labor market, reappear with new dimensions and significance. More generally, it is clear that an accurate understanding of how labor market structures function is essential if we are to analyze alternative policy proposals in the wake of these concerns. Oddly enough, in spite of this great importance, there are no recent monographs that bring together rigorous studies produced by academic researchers on these various issues. This book fills that gap. Under the steely editorship of Ravi Kanbur and Jan Svejnar, the contributors flourish in their attempts to enliven these debates.
These articles include recent research on ways to incorporate the noncognitive side of ability in economic theory and to empirically assess and explain its role in labor market and behavioral outcomes. Contributions investigate the extent to which assignment of workers is determined by traditional cognitive variables and by personality traits. Also presented in this collection is research on the role of noncognitive skills in explaining the labor market position of underrepresented groups and research that integrates the economic and psychological theory and evidence on noncognitive skills.
'Linking Education Policy to Labor Market Outcomes' examines current research and new evidence from Ghana and Pakistan representative of two of the poorest regions of the world to assess how education can increase income and help people move out of poverty. This study indicates that in addition to early investments in cognitive and noncognitive skills which produce a high return and lower the cost of later educational investment by making learning at later ages more efficient quality, efficiency, and linkages to the broader macro-economic context also matter. Education and relevant skills are still the key determinants of good labor market outcomes for individuals. However, education policies aimed at improving skills will have a limited effect on the incomes of that skilled workforce or on the performance of a national economy if other policies that increase the demand for these skills are not in place. For education to contribute to national economic growth, policies should aim at improving the quality of education by spending efficiently and by adapting the basic and postbasic curricula to develop the skills increasingly demanded on the global labor market, including critical thinking, problem solving, social behavior, and information technology.
"Non-cognitive skills" are often used to refers to those skills that do not fall within the cognitive category but to describe a stable pattern of thought, feeling, and behavior in different situations and backgrounds with profitable and investable characteristics, such as conscientiousness, perseverance, and teamwork, which are critically important in education. However, for many years, "non-cognitive skills" have always been ignored in human capital theory. The book, using a multidisciplinary approach, tries to uncover the noncognitive components of human capital, so as to answer the question "what is the skill that should be invested in?" The author expands the connotations of human capital by exploring the value of noncognitive skills and their production patterns, constructing a measurement framework and a set of tools to measure noncognitive skills. She especially carries out an empirical survey which covers primary and secondary school students from seven provinces of China’s east, middle, and west areas. With the data collected, she analyzes Chinese students’ noncognitive development and further identifies the critical factors that may impact their noncognitive skills by applying the Bayesian Model Average approach. The book will be a theoretical contribution to education economics. Researchers interested in education in China, children’s development, and policymakers in the field of education will find this book helpful and resourceful.
A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. Hanushek and Woessmann contend that the cognitive skills of the population—which they term the “knowledge capital” of a nation—are essential to long-run prosperity. Hanushek and Woessmann subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the “Latin American growth puzzle” and the “East Asian miracle” can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance.
The relationship between resources devoted to education and the economy of developing nations is explored. The research seeks to understand if and how investment in education translates into increased economic growth and labor productivity. Additionally, the function of education in reducing various dimensions of economic inequality is examined. The two East African nations that are the study's focus, Kenya and Tanzania, have similar levels of income, but they differ markedly in their public policy toward the provision of secondary education and thus in the educational attainment of the labor force. The research findings provide strong backing for the human capital paradigm: educational expansion is shown to raise labor productivity. The results also show that making education less scarce diminishes inequality in access to education and in income. Numerous figures and tables of data appear throughout this volume; a list of 170 references is included. (DB)
How does education affect economic and social outcomes, and how can it inform public policy?Volume 3 of the Handbooks in the Economics of Education uses newly available high quality data from around the world to address these and other core questions. With the help of new methodological approaches, contributors cover econometric methods and international test score data. They examine the determinants of educational outcomes and issues surrounding teacher salaries and licensure. And reflecting government demands for more evidence-based policies, they take new looks at institutional feaures of school systems. Volume editors Eric A. Hanushek (Stanford), Stephen Machin (University College London) and Ludger Woessmann (Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich) draw clear lines between newly emerging research on the economics of education and prior work. In conjunction with Volume 4, they measure our current understanding of educational acquisition and its economic and social effects. - Uses rich data to study issues of high contemporary policy relevance - Demonstrates how education serves as an important determinant of economic and social outcomes - Benefits from the globalization of research in the economics of education
