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Contents: The conceptual framework -- Educational outcomes and their impact on labor market outcomes -- Employment outcomes and links to the broader economic context -- Conclusion : how education can improve labor market outcomes.

It starts with a demand-side analysis in chapter two, examining historical trends in demand for skills, revealing the types of skills in demand, and projecting future demand for skills driven by economic growth and policy development. Chapter two also highlights the emerging skills shortages and mismatches in Yunnan. The rest of the report focuses on the access, quality, and relevance of Yunnan's education and training system and how effective it is in supplying the skills in demand. An overview of Yunnan's formal and non-formal education and training system is presented in chapter three. Chapter four focuses on the formal Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) system, examining its governance, industry participation, curriculum reforms, quality assurance, and finances. Analysis of the formal education and training system focuses mainly on secondary and tertiary TVET. Chapters five and six address two major training programs outside the formal education system: non-formal training for rural workers and work-based training for urban workers, both of strategic importance. Finally, chapter seven draws on lessons from the Shanghai Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA to demonstrate the role of schools in developing the cognitive skills of 15-year-olds. The report concludes with a summary of findings and a set of policy recommendations for meeting the skills challenges and improving the education and training system.

The formation of health professionals is critical for the health system to function and achieve its universal health coverage (UHC) goals. This is well recognized by the majority of governments that plan for the training and regulations necessary to ensure quality. But the importance of market forces is often overlooked, resulting in interventions and regulations that often fail to achieve their intended effects. The Economics of Health Professional Education and Careers aims to inform the design of health professionals' education policies to better manage health labor market forces toward UHC. It documents what is known about the influence of market forces on the health professional formation process. The contexts of the market for health professional training have been subject to important changes in recent decades, in particular: the growing extent of employment of mid-level cadres of health professionals; changes in technology and the associated growth of high-skilled occupations; the increasing interconnectedness of national health systems through globalization, with its implications for international health professional mobility; and the greater complexity of the public-private mix in employment options. There is a need to ensure that market forces align with the intentions of planning and regulation and the UHC goals. This study provides recommendations to support the design of policies that help to achieve these goals.

It is invariably difficult to estimate the rate of return to university education, because of the problem of omitted variable bias. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the effect of a four-year university education on earnings, and we explore the pathways through which the effect operates. Our estimation exploits the centralized, score-based college/university admission system in China, where the minimum scores required for university admission are externally determined by the provincial governments. Our findings suggest that being eligible for four-year university admission implies a sizable increase in earnings. The payoff can be attributed to the prolonged length of education and improvements in education quality, although the quality effects cannot be precisely estimated.

In this paper, we employ a partially linear nonparametric additive regression estimator, with recent U.S. Current Population Survey data, to analyze returns to schooling. Similar to previous research, we find that blacks and Hispanics have higher rates of return on average. However, for married males, while non-Hispanic whites have lower returns on average, they typically possess the highest returns in the sample. For females, we are able to show that Hispanics have uniformly higher returns over non-Hispanic whites for the full sample. When we restrict our analysis to females whose highest level of education is a high school diploma, we find average, but no longer uniformly higher returns. However, these uniformly higher returns resurface for college graduates.

This book has three main recommendations. First, it is necessary to generate basic standards, quality goals, and quality measurement systems. Second, once quality can be measured, a clear system of accountability should be implemented based on these standards and quality goals. The clients will play a central role in these systems by demanding their rights to quality services; this will only become possible once there are standards and goals that clarify clients’ rights. Third, once there are standards and systems of accountability, investment is needed to strengthen the institutional capacity of the providers.

In this paper, a cost-benefit type of analysis is used to determine the rate of returns to education for the specific case of professional education and training (PET), differentiating for the two types of PET education offered in Switzerland. In contrast to the Mincer-type of analysis, the cost-benefits calculations allow to include the costs of education, direct and indirect, and the risk of unemployment. The net benefits of the PET program are estimated by calculating the discounted wages over the lifecycle, minus lost wages in case of unemployment, and the costs of education for individuals. These net benefits are then compared to those of individuals with upper secondary vocational education. The Swiss Labor Force Survey (SLFS) 1996–2009 is used in this analysis. The panel structure of the SLFS allows to calculate lower bounds of the wage gains, correcting thereby the endogeneity of the educational choice. The results show that, independent of the amount of financial support, individuals completing a PET have significant net-wage gains.

In the planning and development of higher education, it is necessary to understand the major factors affecting senior secondary students' decisions on whether to continue to higher education or to enter into labor force. This is particularly important in countries shifting from a centrally-planned economy to a market-oriented economy where individuals are allowed free choice. This study in 1997 surveyed the educational intentions of 1,513 senior secondary students in Shenzhen, the first and largest Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in China which has adopted a market-oriented economy and an open door policy for the last two decades. Ninety percent of students in the study opted to continue into higher education on completion of senior secondary education. They expected a much higher rate of return to higher education than the remaining ten percent of students who opted to work after completing senior secondary education. The analysis of logistic regression used in this study reveals that students' expected rate of return to higher education has a positive and significant effect on their intention to pursue higher education, after controlling for the effects of the students' gender, family background and ability. It is evident that students in this study acted in accordance with predictions in the human capital theory in making their choice of higher education or work in the market-oriented economy sector of China. This pattern of educational choice has important bearing on the development of higher education in developing countries.

Using Norwegian population panel data with nearly career-long earnings histories, we provide a detailed picture of the causal relationship between schooling and earnings over the life cycle. To address selection bias, we apply three commonly used identification strategies. We find that additional schooling gives higher lifetime earnings and a steeper age-earnings profile, in line with predictions from human capital theory. Our preferred estimates imply an internal rate of return of around 11%, suggesting that it was highly profitable to acquire additional schooling. Our analysis reveals that Mincer regressions dramatically understate the returns to schooling because key assumptions are violated.

This paper uses an unusual pay reform to test the responsiveness of investment in schooling to changes in redistribution schemes that increase the rate of return to education. We exploit an episode where different Israeli kibbutzim shifted from equal sharing to productivity-based wages in different years and find that students in kibbutzim that reformed earlier invested more in high school education and, in the long run, also in post-secondary schooling. We further show that the effect is mainly driven by students in kibbutzim that reformed to a larger degree. Our findings support the prediction that education is highly responsive to changes in the redistribution policy.