教育、健康与农村居民收入差距

人力资本和收入差距关系一直是经济研究中的热点问题,作为人力资本的重要因素,教育和健康对我国农村居民收入差距的扩大起到了关键性的作用,而初始收入差距的存在必然会影响到居民对教育和健康的投资,从而产生人力资本差距,进而对收入差距产生重大影响。文章对相关的文献进行梳理和评述,并对其相互影响的机制进行了探讨和总结。     

Patterns and Sources of Changing Wage Inequality in Chile and Costa Rica During Structural Adjustment

During their respective periods of structural adjustment, inequality increased more rapidly in Chile than in Costa Rica. Using a new technique which measures the effects of changes in the quantities and prices of individual dimension of human capital on overall wage inequality, we identify changes in wage premiums associated with more education as an important cause of the different inequality outcomes. We present evidence that the different education price effects were due to different rates of growth in the demand for more-educated workers. Furthermore, inequality increased in Chile despite a large equalizing education quantity effect.     

Numeracy of Africans,Asians, and Europeans during the early modern period: new evidence from Cape Colony court registers

The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrains investigations into the long‐run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in the developing world. Using the reported ages of criminals in the Court of Justice records in the Cape Archives, this article documents for the first time numeracy levels and trends for inhabitants of the Cape Colony born between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth century: the native Khoesan, European settlers, and imported slaves from other African regions and Asia. This variety of origins allows us to compare contemporaneous levels of early modern development across three continents. By isolating those slaves born at the Cape, we also provide a glimpse into the dynamics of human capital transfer in a colonial setting. The Colony's relatively high level of human capital overall had implications for what was later to be the richest country on African soil, but the very unequal attainment of numeracy also foreshadowed extreme income inequality.     

Exploring the Impact of Energy Sources on Production,Inequality and Poverty in Simultaneous Equations Models for South Africa

Abstract: This work adapts per capita income, energy demand (sub‐group decomposed), inequality and poverty frameworks in a simultaneous equations setting to investigate the role of energy sources on per capita income, inequality and poverty in South Africa. It finds that energy sources (particularly electricity and diesel) are important in estimating production functions. Gasoline, kerosene and coal all exacerbate poverty, with the highest impacts on abject poverty. It is better to disaggregate energy sources in order to capture resource‐specific details. Redistribution efforts that focus on reduction of between‐group inequality can also moderate energy use since between‐group inequality tends to increase the demand for most energy sources. Public efforts are yielding fruits in this direction and should be encouraged. Access to energy sources like electricity, diesel and gas are crucial for productivity enhancement, but for them to yield significant anti‐poverty fruits, efforts must also target broadening capital access by the poor.     

The determinants of income inequality in Thailand: A synthetic cohort analysis

This paper presents tests and estimates of the human capital model of income inequality using synthetic cohort data for Thailand: 1992–2011. The model focuses on four primary determinants of income inequality: mean per capita income levels, the variances in years of education, in the number of children, and in the number of earners in the household. All of these factors are important sources of income inequality in Thailand, with relative impacts that differ across demographic groups and types of household structure. An inverted-U relation between mean per capita income levels and inequality is found, reflecting gender differences of the head of household, differences in household composition, and variation in access to finance. Although the human capital model emphasizes education, estimates presented here show other household characteristics, such as number of children and number of earners, can be even more important sources of inequality.     

Globalization and economic inequality in the short and long run: The case of South Korea 1975–1995

We analyse the determinants of the Gini coefficient for income and expenditure in South Korea between 1975 and 1995. In both cases, we do not find support for the Kuznets inverted-U hypothesis. From an economic globalization viewpoint, the opening of goods markets reduces income inequality in both the short run (the Gini coefficient for income) and the long run (the Gini coefficient for expenditure). On the other hand, the opening of capital markets increases income inequality in both the short and the long run, although the latter is not statistically significant. These results suggest that the effect of economic globalization on income inequality has two routes and two different speeds.     

Early inequality and industrialization: Introduction

Seeking to enrich our understanding of inequality movements, economic historians have used new data to illuminate the earlier darkness that Kuznets urged us to explore. To explore earlier worlds without income tax returns or modern household surveys, they have turned to non-income measures of purchasing power and well-being. The articles in this issue give a good sampling from this new wave of the economic history of inequality.     

收入分配、医疗资源与人口健康:一个跨国研究

收入分配与人口健康的关系是一个争论已久的问题。本文在总结各种理论假说和以往实证研究的基础上,使用新的、质量较好的跨国面板数据,重新检验了收入分配与人口健康的关系。本文的分析重点有二:一是收入分配对人口健康的滞后影响;二是医疗资源在收入分配与人口健康的相关关系中所起的作用。本文的主要发现是,收入不均对人口健康的确有不利影响,但这种不利影响需要10年或更长的滞后期才能充分显现出来,这种滞后性是以往使用固定效应模型的跨国研究未能检测到收入不均与人口健康具有负相关关系的主要原因。此外,医疗资源(特别是初级医疗资源)人均拥有量对人口健康有积极作用;医疗资源有可能通过某种不可观察固定因素对收入分配与人口健康的关系发生影响。这些发现有助于澄清关于收入分配与人口健康关系的争论,对医疗政策也有重要参考价值。     

寒门难出贵子?——基于“家庭财富-教育投资-贫富差距”的实证研究

文章首次从教育选择的角度出发,探讨了人力资本投资与收入差距之间的关系,作者首先建立了教育回报的代际交迭模型,推断出富裕家庭教育回报率高这个事实会拉大社会的贫富差距。作者使用1992年至2009年的中国城镇住户调查数据对理论推论进行了论证,实证结果表明出身"寒门"的子女期望教育回报率更低,这拉大了与富裕家庭群体的收入差距,也是"寒门难出贵子"的原因。自2001年来,家庭因素带来的教育回报差异能够解释19.1%的城镇居民收入差距,引入工具变量的结果表明,真实的情况可能更加严重。作者进一步模拟了"新常态"下的贫富差距状况,结果表明,经济潜在增速下降会使得基尼系数扩大6.1%。     

教育对地区内收入差距的贡献:来自上海微观数据的考察

作为人力资本的一个度量,教育对于收入差距的贡献一直受到广泛的关注,但却研究不够.本文借助上海市1431户家庭的微观数据,估计了一个包含教育变量的收入决定函数,然后在基于回归分析的收入差距分解框架内,运用最新发展起来的夏普里值过程(Shapley Value Approach),分解出了教育对于收入差距的贡献大小.通过比较发现,与地区间差距的情形不同,教育对于地区内收入差距而言是最重要的影响因素.     

Measures of human capital and the mechanics of economic growth

We examine the mechanism by which human capital affects economic growth and convergence, using provincial level panel data from China. We specify alternative measures of human capital and apply them to an enhanced growth model, which we estimate parametrically, nonparametrically, and with a threshold model. Our results show that economic convergence is pronouncedly conditional on human capital across all measures. The positive “benefit of being backward” due to lower initial income is almost trumped by the negative impact of low levels of human capital in the poorest areas.     

A colonial legacy of African gender inequality? Evidence from Christian Kampala, 1895–2011

The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century‐long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white‐collar (high‐status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white‐collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. However, gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre‐colonial times. The data presented here also support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in indigenous social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well‐educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.     

China＇s Regional Inequality in Innovation Capability, 1995-2006

This paper assesses both interregional and intraregional innovation inequality in China from 1995 to 2006.It is revealed that the east-central-west inequality has increased over time,whereas the inter-provincial inequality showed a V-pattern until 2003;Both inequality measures oscillated from 2004 to 2006.Using a decomposition framework recently developed by one of the authors,we determined that the major factors driving innovation inequality are population,economic development level,R&D,location and openness.The aggravated innovation inequality reflects the growth of China’s innovation centers in the eastern region and their admission into the global innovation networks.The fact that R&D is a major factor driving the inequality suggests that,considered in the present study,the efficiency of R&D investment improved in certian regions during the period(1995-2006).Finally, geographic location and openness affect innovation inequality primarily through the coupled evolution of innovation capability and economic development,resulting in first-mover advantages to provinces of the eastern region.     

Capital Structure and Bank Performance: Empirical Evidence from Ghana

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of capital structure on profitability of commercial banks in Ghana. The study used a sample of 21 commercial banks over the period 2000–2014 using panel corrected standard errors and two‐stage least‐squares estimation approaches. The results show that bank capital structure measured as capital‐to‐asset ratio is a robust and positive driver of bank performance (profitability) measures (return on assets and net interest margin). Additionally, the results further indicate that share of customer demand deposit positively affects bank profitability. The positive relationship between the capital‐to‐asset ratio and performance provides support for the bank capitalization policy implemented by the Bank of Ghana. Also, the findings provide evidence in support of the recent upsurge in bank short‐term deposit mobilization strategies and promotions by commercial banks in the country to enhance their deposit base.     

The impact of education on income inequality and intergenerational mobility

This paper analyses the effects of innate ability, compulsory education (grades 1–9), and non-compulsory education (grades 10–12 and higher education) on inequality and intergenerational mobility of income, by constructing a four-period overlapping-generation model. We find that innate ability and family investment in early education play important roles in explaining income inequality and intergenerational income mobility. Though children from the wealthiest families are only 1.36 times ‘smarter’ that those from the poorest, the gap in human capital expands to 2.35 at the end of compulsory education and to 2.89 at the end of non-compulsory education. One important reason for the increase is that poor families invest relatively less in children's early education than do wealthy families; therefore, their children attend lower-quality schools, which results in them being much less likely to participate in higher education. By simulating policy experiments for different types of government education expenditure, we find that direct subsidies to poor parents are the most efficient and effective policy for mitigating poor families' budget constraints with regard to early-education investment in their children.     

Human Capital and Hours Worked of Children in Cambodia: Empirical Evidence for Policy Implications*

This study uses data from the Cambodian Child Labor Survey 2001/02 (CCLS‐2001/02) to investigate the trade‐off between child labor and their human capital formation. It also investigates the determinants of child schooling and that of the income earned from child labor. This study finds that children's education is a significant determinant of their wage rate, which implicitly explains the logic behind the household's decision to allow a child to both work and study, and thus explains why parents keep investing in their children's education. We also find that non‐poor households and fathers’ and mothers’ education have statistically significant effects on child schooling. Finally, this study has found that if children's average working hours are below the threshold level of 22 h per week, then education is not affected. These research findings have policy implications for the human capital development of children, as well as for broader social policy in Cambodia.     

Intergenerational transfer of human capital and its impact on income mobility: Evidence from China

This paper analyzes theoretically and empirically the impact of intergenerational transmission of human capital on the income mobility in China. We use a three-period overlapping-generations (OLG) model to show that the human capital transfer plays a remarkable role in determining the parent-to-offspring investment in human capital and the intergenerational elasticity of income. We then estimate a simultaneous equations model (SEM) using the 1989–2009 China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data to verify our theoretical predictions. The results show that (i) human capital, measured by health and education, is directly transmitted from one generation to the next, reflecting the parent-induced inequality of development opportunities among offspring in China; (ii) the estimated intergenerational income elasticity increases from 0.429 to 0.481 when the direct transfer of human capital is accounted for, suggesting that omitting this mechanism would overestimate China's income mobility. Our findings provide policy implications on strengthening human capital investments among the disadvantaged groups, reinforcing reforms that promote equality of opportunity, and improving the efficiency of labor markets in China.     

Education and the ability to export manufactures: The relevance to South Africa of the Wood model

According to Wood there is a strong causal relation between education of the population and exports of manufactures. Also, a country that is rich in natural resources will tend to have low manufactured exports, which will be exacerbated by low investment in education. Wood's model is applied to South Africa. Increasing the education of the population will be crucial for expanding higher‐value‐added manufactured exports, increasing per capita incomes and reducing earnings inequality in South Africa.     

Spatial Comparisons of Poverty and Inequality in Living Standards in Malawi

The paper looks at poverty and inequality across areas in Malawi. The focus is on both monetary (consumption) and non‐monetary (health and education) dimensions of well‐being. Stochastic poverty dominance tests show that rural areas are poorer in the three dimensions regardless of poverty line chosen. Stochastic inequality dominance tests find that the north and south dominate the centre in health inequality, and there is no dominance between the north and south. With respect to education inequality, dominance is declared for the south‐centre pair only. A subgroup decomposition analysis finds that the south contributes the most to consumption and education poverty, while the centre is the largest contributor to health poverty. We establish that within‐area inequalities (vertical inequalities) rather than between‐area inequalities (horizontal inequalities) are the major driver of consumption, health and education inequality in Malawi.     

对外贸易和外商直接投资对中国人力资本存量影响的实证研究——基于岭回归分析法

文章首先建立模型,然后利用我国1983～2008年的时间序列数据,运用岭回归法实证研究了对外贸易和外商直接投资对人力资本存量的影响.结果发现,进口贸易显著地提升了我国人力资本;出口贸易对人力资本的正面影响系数很小;外商直接投资有利于人力资本的提升,但提升的幅度较小;国内生产总值和教育经费增加有助于提升人力资本.最后,文...