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.