Income inequality and education revisited: persistence,endogeneity and heterogeneity

This article presents new results on the relationship between income inequality and education expansion – that is, increasing average years of schooling and reducing inequality of schooling. When dynamic panel estimation techniques are used to address issues of persistence and endogeneity, we find a large, positive, statistically significant and stable relationship between inequality of schooling and income inequality, especially in emerging and developing economies and among older-age cohorts. The relationship between income inequality and average years of schooling is positive, consistent with constant or increasing returns to additional years of schooling. While this positive relationship is small and not always statistically significant, we find a statistically significant negative relationship with years of schooling of younger cohorts. Statistical tests indicate that our dynamic estimators are consistent and that our identifying instruments are valid. Policy simulations suggest that education expansion will continue to be inequality reducing. This role will diminish as countries develop, but it could be enhanced through a stronger focus on reducing inequality in the quality of education.     

Agricultural Pricing Policies in Developing Countries: An Application to Pakistan

The range of and constraints on policy instruments available to thegovernment when raising and distributing revenue can have importantconsequences for the efficiency and equity implications of pricingpolicy. The usual trade-off between equity and efficiency ismagnified. We emphasize the potential for substantial efficiency gainsfrom reforming agricultural pricing policies and from developing moredirect income transfer mechanisms. The importance of incorporatingcross-price effects is highlighted and we show that these can changethe direction of welfare-improving marginal price reforms.     

Incentives,allocation and labour-market reforms during transition: the case of urban China, 1986-1990

More than 10 years after the seminal paper by Borjas and Bratsberg (1996), modelling the impact of skills on remigration, the empirical evidence on that theory is still mixed. Our article is to shed light on that issue. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) we test two hypotheses derived from Borjas and Bratsberg (1996) while allowing for endogeneity of host country-specific capital. Our results give strong support for their theory. Additionally a sensitivity analysis shows that the insignificance of education in previous studies is due to the test design conducted and cannot be interpreted as falsification of Borjas and Bratsberg's (1996) theory.     

Cost-effectiveness Analysis of Demand- and Supply-side Education Interventions: the Case of PROGRESA in Mexico

The paper is concerned with the issue of the most cost‐effective way of improving access to education for poor households in developing countries. The authors consider two alternatives: extensive expansion of the school system (i.e., bringing education to the poor), and subsidizing investment in education by the poor (i.e., bringing the poor to the education system). To this end, the authors evaluate PROGRESA, a large poverty‐alleviation program recently introduced in Mexico, which subsidizes education. Using double‐difference regression estimators on data collected before and after the program for randomly selected “control” and “treatment” households, the relative impacts of the demand‐ and supply‐side program components are estimated. Combining these estimates with cost information, it is found that the demand‐side subsidies are substantially more cost‐effective than supply‐side expansions.     

On the Targeting and Redistributive Efficiencies of Alternative Transfer Instruments

The distributional characteristic provides an attractive alternative to conventional approaches used to evaluate the targeting performance of transfer programs. We decompose it into two components that are useful both conceptually and empirically; one capturing the targeting efficiency of the instrument, the other its redistributive efficiency . The redistributive index can also be generalized for the purposes of evaluating the degree of progressivity in tax-benefit structures. For illustrative purposes, we present an empirical application of the distributional characteristic and its decomposition using Mexican data. The welfare gains from using categorical targeting and means testing reflect improvements in redistributive and targeting efficiency respectively.     

Commodity Taxation and Social Welfare: The Generalized Ramsey Rule

Commodity taxes have three distinct roles: (1) revenue collection, (2) interpersonal redistribution, and (3) resource allocation. The paper presents an integrated treatment of these three concerns in a second-best general equilibrium framework, which leads to the generalized Ramsey rule for optimum taxation. We show how many standard results on optimum taxation and tax reform have a straightforward counterpart in this general framework. Using this framework, we also try to clarify the notion of deadweight loss, as well as the relation between alternative distributional assumptions and the structure of optimum taxes.     

医保改革面临挑战

当前,许多国家仍存在医疗服务可得性差、医疗成本高昂、公共卫生支出效率低下等问题,医保改革面临重大挑战。医保改革目标存在两难—既要改善人们的健康状况,又要控制支出成本,因而提高公共卫生支出效率是改善社会健康状况的最优选择。各国政府的干预形式和公共卫生支出水平因国别、时间等的不同而变化。财政状况较好的新兴经济体需在保证财政可持续的前提下扩大基本医保覆盖面;发达经济体则应注重提升公共卫生支出的效率并限制支出增长速度。     

Targeting Outcomes Redux

A newly constructed comprehensive database of 122 targeted antipovertyinterventions in 48 countries is used to examine the contestedissue of the efficacy of targeting interventions in developingcountries. Though the median program transfers 25 percent moreto poor individuals (those in the bottom two quintiles) thanwould universal allocation, a quarter of the interventions areregressive. Targeting is better in richer countries, in countrieswhere governments are more likely to be held accountable, andin countries where inequality is higher. Interventions thatuse means testing, geographic targeting, and self-selectionbased on a work requirement are all associated with an increasedshare of benefits going to poor people. Proxy-means testing,community-based selection, and demographic targeting to childrenshow good results on average but with wide variation. Self-selectionbased on consumption, demographic targeting to the elderly,and community bidding show limited potential for good targeting.The substantial variation in targeting performance within specificprogram types and specific targeting methods suggests that differencesin implementation are also important factors in determiningthe success of targeting to poor individuals.      

Positioning of emotional intelligence skills within the overall skillset of practice-based accountants: employer and graduate requirements

This paper presents evidence of employer and graduate attitudes on the skill set requirements for professional accountants, and whether university accounting programs develop these skills, and in particular emotional intelligence (EI) skills. We use priority indices and strategic mapping to evaluate the positioning of 31 skills. This analysis suggests that university accounting programs could consider increasing the emphasis placed on particular EI and non-emotional intelligence (non-EI) skills while other skills could be de-emphasised. While non-EI skills were ranked higher than EI skills, some non-EI skills are considered well developed in graduates and others are viewed as important but not well developed. While employers expect correspondence between the skills seen as important in the workplace and their expected development in university, there was also reverse correspondence in that employers do not expect universities to develop skills considered less important in the workplace.     

医保改革面临挑战

当前,许多国家仍存在医疗服务可得性差、医疗成本高昂、公共卫生支出效率低下等问题,医保改革面临重大挑战。医保改革目标存在两难—既要改善人们的健康状况,又要控制支出成本,因而提高公共卫生支出效率是改善社会健康状况的最优选择。各国政府的干预形式和公共卫生支出水平因国别、时间等的不同而变化。财政状况较好的新兴经济体需在保证财政可持续的前提下扩大基本医保覆盖面;发达经济体则应注重提升公共卫生支出的效率并限制支出增长速度。