Narrow Results

Using a natural experiment, we examine the causal effect of a team incentive scheme on teachers in a Chinese middle school that intended to help the school’s students improve in their weak subjects. The scheme was successful, the average treatment effect is positively significant in math and total scores. The most improvement observed in top students’ weak subjects. The top students weak in math, English and social science improved in those subjects by 0.12, 0.10, 0.16 standard deviations, respectively. Students at the bottom 20% of the testing distribution also improved in Chinese and math.

We develop an overlapping generation model to examine how the relationship between status concerns, fertility and education affect growth performances. Results are threefold. First, we show that stronger status motives heighten the desire of parents to have fewer but better educated children, which may foster economic development. Second, the government should sometimes postpone the introduction of an economic policy in order to maintain the process of economic development, although such a policy aims to implement the social optimum. Third, status can alter the dynamic path of the economy and help to explain the facts about fertility during the great transition.

The phenomenon of terrorism has riveted world's unwavering attention since 9/11. The underlying study investigates the determinants of terrorism in the South Asian region. Applying negative binomial regression, the study finds that both political structure and economic conditions are responsible for terrorism. On the economic front, relative deprivation represented by income disparity is the major cause of terrorism. On the other hand, deprivation of the people of their political rights and civil liberties, exhibited by political repression, compels them to be involved in terrorist activities. Our findings illustrates that high literacy rate is one of the foremost reason for terrorism in the region.

The rapid expansion of higher education in the late 1980s in Taiwan has resulted in a swift increase in the supply of highly-educated workers in the labor market. This research differs from past studies in that it analyzes the effect of the rapid expansion in higher education in Taiwan with emphasis on the cohort effect, specifically examining the effect of changes both in intra-cohort relative supply and the aggregate relative supply on college returns. Besides, when estimating the aggregate relative supply of college graduates, this study takes into account the substitutability between younger and older educated workers. We present evidence that the expansion policy has significantly depressed college premiums for workers of all ages, but the adverse effect is particularly concentrated among the younger cohorts. Furthermore, we found the elasticity of substitution between college and high school graduates to be 3–4 times higher than in developed countries. We also found the important role played by the demand side, likely linked to technological progress and changes in export structure toward the more technologically intensive. As a consequence, the expansion of higher education and increase in the relative demand for higher-educated workers, along with high elasticity of substitution between college and high school graduates, led to the rigid low college premiums.

We present evidence against the well-established education–health gradient by relating education to measured hypertension status in 5,873 men and 6,152 women aged 40$+$ in Indonesia. Once a basic set of covariates was controlled for, the two variables were not statistically significantly related. We argue that this lack was due to neglect of chronic diseases. It appears that the assumption of full information in theories on the education–health gradient is too strong to be applied to the developing world. Therefore, more information needs to be provided to the public regarding the seriousness of chronic diseases and preventive and curative methods.

This study is conducted to examine the effect on income inequality of government spending on education across 63 provinces in Vietnam. The generalized method of moments (GMM) regression technique is used to address potential endogeneity in the model caused by income inequality and inequality in government spending on education. Income inequality is proxied by both the Gini coefficient and the Theil index. Inequality in government spending on education in Vietnam is estimated using a novel entropic approach, which decomposes the inequality into two components: “within-province” inequality and “between-province” inequality. Data for the period from 2010 to 2016 are used. Our empirical findings are summarized as follows. First, “within-province” inequality accounts for a substantial portion of inequality in government spending on education. This means that although the Vietnamese national government has done well in terms of allocating spending on education across 63 provinces, inequality in education spending appears across districts within provinces. Second, both total inequality of government spending on education and its two components are positively associated with income inequality across provinces. As such, reducing differences in government spending on education across provinces and across districts within provinces is an effective mechanism for reducing income inequality across provinces and across districts within provinces in Vietnam.

This study focused on the trilemma association of education, income and poverty alleviation: managerial implications for inclusive economic growth in developing countries in Asia to establish the proportion of the poor in the population and further identify its determinants. This research utilized secondary data from 1990 to 2016 by using econometric estimation. The results show that education decreases poverty when evaluated through the poverty gap and poverty headcount ratio and employment and increasing rate of economic development in the form of GDP to reducing poverty. GDP the Gini coefficient show the same signs while the magnitudes of the coefficients. Consequently, improvement in an independent variable will decrease poverty while the results have various levels of contributions through static and dynamic panel data methods, that education can reduce poverty. Results indicate that the level of poverty stood at 62.2%. The level of education, poverty headcount ratio, poverty gap and secondary school enrolment were significant in determining a household’s poverty status. However, land ownership and household head’s occupation were not statistically significant in explaining the probability of a household’s poverty status. From the results, this study recommends that all stakeholders work towards reducing poverty in the study to enhance education and family planning.

In 2002, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced a goal of quadrupling per capita income by the year 2020. Starting at income levels of the year 2000, this would require a growth rate of 7.2 percent per annum in per capita income or close to 8.0 percent in GDP. Such unresolved and emerging problems as growing income disparities, increasing pollution, pressures on infrastructure, the inefficiency of stateowned enterprises, and political instability are often cited as reasons to doubt the attainability of the CCP's goal. However, China's progress in addressing fundamental constraints that might limit rapid economic growth augurs well for the success of its economic goals. Although there are disagreements about economic policy among top leaders, the continued transformation into a market economy and the promotion of increasing local autonomy in economic matters are not in doubt. In education, China has substantially increased the percentage of its workforce receiving a college education, and continuing growth in this investment in human capital could account for a large portion of the desired growth rate. In addition, the value of improvements in the quality of economic output unmeasured by GDP, such as advances in the quality of health care and education, could raise reported growth rates by as much as 60 percent. Finally, the government's increasing sensitivity to public opinion and issues of inequality and corruption, combined with improving living conditions, have resulted in a level of popular confidence in the government that makes political instability unlikely.

This paper assesses the effects of education and health on economic growth by partitioning the reasons for cross-country variation in income levels into three components: (i) persistent factors influencing the level of output; (ii) time-varying factors influencing the level of output (e.g., levels of health and education); and (iii) persistent factors influencing a country's rate of technical progress. Persistent factors are ones that remain unchanged (e.g., geographical location) or that change only slightly in the time period under study (e.g., potentially endogenous determinants of technical progress such as a country's orientation toward free trade). Multi-level modeling techniques using maximum likelihood methods were used for estimation. This paper draws on earlier work but extends it to use more recently available data including China. The initial analysis used data on 53 countries over the period 1965–1990 and estimated that education improvements accounted for about 14% of economic growth over this period and health improvements accounted for about 11%. The extended analysis, including China, that this paper reports included data from 86 countries over the period 1960–2000 at 10-year intervals. Findings were broadly similar to the initial analysis, although the magnitude of the estimated effects for education and for health were smaller. Taking our range of models and parameter estimates into account, we feel that education improvements probably accounted for 5%–8% of China's economic growth between 1970 and 2000 and that health improvements accounted for 1%–5%. Our small and imprecise China-specific estimate of health's effect probably results from the atypical pattern in China of successful early efforts to improve health followed by stagnation in health during the later period of rapid growth.

This paper offers an explanation of the quantitative changes in education spending by the framework of demand analysis, including the changes in the ratio of educational funding to GDP in the period 1991–2002. The income effect is estimated mainly by using cross-provincial data, while time series data are used to estimate the price effect. Changes in government and non-government spending through time can be satisfactorily explained by the income and price effects. Demand for education services in the three levels of primary school, secondary school and higher education, and aggregate demand for all education services are investigated. The relation between income inequality and inequality in education opportunities is briefly discussed. Ten important findings are stated.

This paper updates our knowledge of Chinese school enrollment and graduation patterns by analyzing the 2000 Chinese Census. Looking at the school enrollment and attainment snapshot in 2000 and comparing these rates with the enrollment rates in 1990 provides us with important insight into the effect of economic, social and institutional reforms of the 1990s on the generation of students coming through the system in the early post economic reform era. The findings show that substantial progress has been made in China's goal of universal education for all children through the 9th grade.

Recent research literature on migration in China has mainly focused on adult migrants. As more and more people participate in the migration process and as migrants expand the duration of their stays in cities, migrant children increasingly become part of the migration stream. The presence of large numbers of migrant children in cities, especially children without local hukou, creates major problems for their parents and challenges for education policy-makers. In this paper, we examine the school enrollment of migrant children who resided in cities of Guangdong province in 1995. Using data from the 1995 China 1% Population Sample Survey, we apply a research strategy that incorporates both migration origin as well as destination. This allows us to estimate school enrollment rates for temporary migrant children, permanent migrant children, and local children, in addition to non-migrant children at the place of origin. Two major findings emerge from multivariate analyses of school enrollment. First, temporary migrant children are much less likely to be enrolled in school compared to local children. Temporary migrants with less than one year of residence in cities suffer the most. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, permanent migrant children are more likely to be enrolled in school than local children due largely to the highly selective nature of their parents. Second, compared to non-migrant children at the place of origin, rural temporary migrant children from Guangdong also encounter a major disadvantage in terms of school enrollment. As education becomes more and more important for socio-economic mobility in the Chinese society, such disadvantages faced by temporary migrant children is likely to have detrimental and long-term consequences for migrant children and for urban society as a whole.

Since the 1980s health care reform in rural China, the coverage of public health insurance has considerably diminished and the price of medical service continues to increase. Using data from the 1991 and 1997 China Health and Nutrition Surveys, this paper examines the rural residents' demand for medical care and illustrates the impact of the reform. Our study reveals a positive relationship between education and health status, and a negative relationship between education and medical expenditure. Simultaneously, the income effect of medical care is inelastic (0.31), which means that individuals with lower income are burdened with higher medical expenditure. In addition, the income effect significantly influences the decision to seek care when ill, which implies a credit constraint in health care consumption. There has been a persistent increase of inequality in rural China. Our study suggests that the situation is much worse if we take into account the health inequality and higher medical expenditure of the poor people.

This chapter highlights evidence that links women's health challenges in LMICs to economics at every stage of life. It advances the notion that discrimination against women persists for sociocultural and economic reasons and is embodied in ill health and disability across the life span.

Beginning in infancy and early childhood, girls face a variety of disadvantages that profoundly affect their health and well-being. These barriers — which include poor access to health care, nutrition and education — continue to affect women, their health, and their economic viability across the life cycle. In adolescence girls face risks associated with gender-based violence and sexually transmitted diseases, while early marriage and early pregnancy contribute to their exit from schooling. Adulthood for women is then marked by a myriad of interrelated issues — including reproductive health concerns, chronic disease, obesity, injury, intimate partner violence (IPV) and mental health problems — which encompass the long-term impact of developmental adversities. Finally, in old age, women's burdens of disease and disability reflect the health inequities faced throughout life and often coincide with a lack of financial security, neglect and abuse. Effectively addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive approach, including efforts to target gender-based inequities, educational campaigns and diagonal health systems strategies.