The Long-Run Effects of Education Privatization on Labour Productivity

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-036-7_6How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Education privatization; Labour productivity; Human capital; Low-fee private schools; International development

Abstract

Education has long been regarded as an important determinant of the growth of labour productivity particularly for its nature as a major instrument for human capital investment. Many theoretical and empirical studies from the literature on development economics as well as on education influenced by the human capital theory have generally illustrated the positive association between the accumulation of knowledge and skills through educational attainment and the level of labour productivity or, in a broader term, economic growth. Over the recent decades, however, actors from the private entity have increasingly taken over the responsibility to run educational institutions to overcome prolonged budgetary pressure and enhance efficiency. This paper investigates the long-term labour productivity effects of education privatization. Calibrating the model using cross-national panel data on the private education share and labour productivity, the authors find that a higher rate of private school enrolment is positively correlated with a higher level of labour productivity in all specifications in the primary and secondary level of education. The detailed statistical analysis by national income level, however, shows that an increase in the share of enrolment in private secondary schools in low-income countries appears to have a negative impact on labour productivity unlike the case of high- and middle-income countries.

Research Contribution: This study explores the impact of education privatization beyond direct cognitive abilities of pupils or the quality of educational institutions/services and investigates empirically how it is associated with labour productivity, one of the major long-term effects of education that has been rather intuitively understood as a potential gain of education privatization.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - J. Kim
AU  - S. Choksawatpaisan
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/05/16
TI  - The Long-Run Effects of Education Privatization on Labour Productivity
BT  - Proceedings of the Erasmus Scientific Days 2022 (ESD 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 51
EP  - 63
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-036-7_6
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-036-7_6
ID  - Kim2023
ER  -