A rather interesting paper came to my attention. The authors use the UNESCO yearbooks for 1964 to 1999 and use the ratio of rural to urban average schooling years to study rural–urban educational inequality, and they also investigate cross-country variation in the levels of rural and urban educational attainment. Quite a good literature review and a rather interesting empirical approach here.
I will quote their conclusions later on, but the fact that they find that the rural educational quality is heavily dependent upon the colonial history (you are better off if you had the Brits compared to the French!), type of legal system, degree of political stability as well as geographical characteristics, such as landlockedness and a country's surface area.
If there is too much inequality, then upwardly mobile and ambitious people will move to urban areas so if you wanted to manage the migration to urban areas, you might want to consider these issues as well.
I quote their conclusions at length:
In this paper, we have studied differences between rural and urban educational attainment across a diverse group of 56 countries. Using the ratio of rural to urban average years of schooling as our measure of rural–urban educational inequality, we find that countries with greater resources and those with more effective channels to allocate these resources have lower RUEI. Such distributional channels seem to be influenced by institutional characteristics, such as the type of legal system, colonial history, degree of political stability as well as geographical characteristics, such as landlockedness and a country's surface area.
Some of the most significant results we find are about the impact of colonial histories on RUEI. We find that countries with colonial pasts in general, and those that gained their independence in the post-war period in particular, have greater RUEI. We also find that in countries with legal systems of French origin, the educational inequality between rural and urban citizens is much wider than in other countries, implying greater RUEI. This may be associated with the bureaucracy of French legal systems and urban bias identified in the literature; see La Porta et al. (1999) for the former and Henderson (2005) for the latter. Conversely, countries with legal systems of British origin exhibit lower RUEI, which may be due to the types of colonies settled by the British. British colonies were less likely to be extractive and more likely to involve a high degree of settlement, with colonists demanding the rights and privileges afforded to citizens in the colonizing country (see Acemoglu et al., 2001). We also identified an interaction effect between the level of economic development and some of the factors already mentioned. Most important were the interactions with legal systems and colonial histories. We found the French (British) legal system variable to have a positive (negative) interaction with economic development. That is, developing economies exhibit more (less) rural–urban educational inequality if they have a legal system of French (British) origin, while the reverse is true of developed economies. On the other hand, countries with colonial pasts and those with post-war independence have higher RUEI, regardless of development.
In addition, we find that riskier human capital investment, less credit availability and landlockedness of nations are all associated with relatively lower rural educational levels and greater RUEI. Conversely, larger formal labor markets and better infrastructure are associated with lower RUEI.
In light of the impact of human capital on economic growth (see for example, Doppelhofer et al., 2004), our results suggest that colonial history and the types of legal systems in place (British versus French) have long run implications for countries. Overall, rural–urban differences in human capital accumulation seem to have been considerably influenced by the historical, and in many cases, colonially-imposed institutional structure within a country.
Mehmet A. Ulubasoglu and Buly A. Cardak, International comparisons of rural-urban educational attainment: Data and determinants, European Economic Review, Volume 51, Issue 7, , October 2007, Pages 1828-1857. Abstract: We study cross-country differences in rural and urban educational attainment by using a data set comprising 56 countries. We focus on the determinants of rural-urban educational inequality, which is measured by the ratio of rural to urban average years of schooling within each country. We find that riskier human capital investment, less credit availability, a colonial heritage, a legal system of French origin and landlockedness of nations are all associated with relatively lower rural educational levels and greater rural-urban educational inequality. Conversely, larger formal labor markets, better infrastructure and a legal system of British origin are associated with relatively higher rural educational levels and lower rural-urban educational inequality. We also identify an interaction effect between economic development level and some of these factors. In particular, we find that as development level increases, the negative (positive) relationship between French (British) legal systems and rural-urban educational inequality is reversed and becomes positive (negative). Keywords: Human capital; Economic geography; Education; Rural and urban educational inequality
No comments:
Post a Comment