Table 2 - uploaded by Shinichi Nishiyama
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Source publication
"To examine how local income distribution affects both a community's ability to pay for schooling and the quality of that schooling, this research merges household and school census data from South Africa. Empirical results are twofold. First, while the median income and the average household income increase school fees, inequality inhousehold inco...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... Columns 5 and 6, which use alternative criteria, we also obtain quite similar parameter estimates, which implies that our results are not derived spuriously from the inclusion of too sparsely populated nonresidential areas. Table 2 reports results on school fee determination, based on the merged community and school sample from the province of KwaZulu Natal. Factors of interest are community income distribution characteristics: median and standard deviation. ...
Citations
This paper draws on a political economy model to hypothesize that the quality of education is likely to be lowered by both economic and political inequalities. In particular, we utilize a panel data set across countries and over time to test the applicability of the hypothesis to quality of education indicators at the primary level. We choose four specific indicators, which has been assigned priority in the World Millennium Development Goals, Gross Enrollment Rates, Net Enrollment Rates, Pupil -Teacher Ratios and Survival Rates from Grades 1 to 5. Because of its considerable variation in political and economic inequality across countries as well as over time and its general reputation for high income inequality, our application is to countries of the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Although the sample is rather small and the quality and other measures less than optimal, the results provide fairly strong support for our hypothesis.. The authors express their appreciation for help of Ike Song , Parul Srivastava and Rabiga Ibrayeva in collecting data and literature for this study.
This paper examines a range of historical and geographic factors that determine the quality of public school education in post-apartheid South Africa. Empirical analysis shows, first, that population groups are still spatially segregated due to the legacy of apartheid, which implies that, given the positive correlation between school quality and school fees, quality education is concentrated in formerly white, coloured and Indian schools in areas where the majority is non-African. Second, school quality, measured by the learner-educator ratio, improves as school fee and government subsidy increase. In this sense, school fee can be decreased with an increase in government subsidy to maintain school quality. It is also shown that government subsidy is allocated to schools with lower quality and fees, increasing the number of subsidized teachers. To address the current imbalance, financial support to disadvantaged locales and schools should be strengthened further.
Purpose
To formalize and test the hypotheses that economic and political inequality tend to lower the quality of public education and thereby the overall quality of education in developing countries.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses both international cross‐section data and panel data from almost 100 countries to test these hypothesized effects of the two types of inequality on educational quality. Three different indicators of school quality, all at the primary level, are used. The paper tests the robustness of the findings to different estimation methods, specifications and the use of instruments for a potentially endogenous variable.
Findings
There is clear empirical support for the hypothesized negative effects of political inequality and ethnic fragmentation on educational quality. The evidence for the hypothesized effect of income inequality, however, is very weak at best.
Research limitations/implications
The educational quality measures are crude and the analysis is at the country level. Future work can use more direct, achievement‐based measures of quality and data at the district or county levels.
Practical implications
Redistribution of income and democratization can have beneficial effects on educational quality.
Originality/value
The paper provides a theoretical model that formalizes the hypothesis that economic and political inequality can lower the quality of public education and thereby the overall quality of education. It empirically tests this model using panel and cross‐sectional data.
