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China's higher education expansion and unemployment of college graduates
Abstract
We document the sharp expansion of higher education in China beginning in 1999 and analyze its impacts on the unemployment of college graduates, using nationally representative population surveys from 2000 and 2005. We show that the expansion policy has increased the probability of college attendance among high school graduates. Using a difference-indifference strategy, we find that China's expansion policy has sharply increased the unemployment rate among young college graduates, and that the unemployment rate for college graduates increases more in non-coastal (especially central) regions than in large coastal cities. We suggest that encouraging regional mobility of college graduates and increasing matching quality can potentially reduce the unemployment rate at the national level.
... Creșterea aparent semnificativă a ratei șomajului persoanelor cu studii superioare, subocuparea și magnitudinea neconcordanțelor dintre aptitudinile dobândite ale absolvenților de studii superioare și abilitățile solicitate de către angajatori sunt subiecte ce s-au bucurat de atenția cercetătorilor, mai ales în ultimii ani, pe fondul expansiunii învățământului superior în societățile moderne (Weligamage și Sununta, 2003;Koen, 2006;Pauw et al., 2008;Branson et al., 2009;Olowe, 2009;Farooq, 2011;Broecke, 2012;Van Broekhuizen, 2016). Cercetări relativ recente arată că sub-ocuparea și șomajul sunt fenomene cu efecte negative devastatoare în viețile persoanelor care au absolvit studii superioare (Bai, 2006;Li et al., 2014). ...
... În ultima perioadă, pe fondul expansiunii educației superioare, în literatura de specialitate a fost publicat un set de studii orientate asupra creșterii îngrijorătoare a ratei șomajului indivizilor cu studii superioare, sub-ocuparea și neconcordanțele evidente dintre aptitudinile dobândite de tinerii absolvenți și abilitățile solicitate de către angajatori (Weligamage și Sununta, 2003;Koen, 2006;Pauw et al., 2008;Branson et al., 2009;Olowe, 2009;Farooq, 2011;Broecke, 2012;Van Broekhuizen, 2016). Cercetări relativ recente arată că sub-ocuparea și șomajul sunt fenomene cu efecte negative devastatoare în viețile persoanelor care au absolvit studii superioare (Bai, 2006;Li et al., 2014). Ocuparea și șomajul indivizilor cu studii superioare sunt un subiect insuficient investigat în România, de aceea, scopul acestei monografii este și de a completa un gol din literatura de specialitate. ...
... Relevant research on the expansion of China's university enrollment also explored the effect of policies from multiple perspectives. Ref. [11] found that China's expansion policy has caused the unemployment rate of college graduates to rise sharply, and the unemployment rate of college graduates in non-coastal areas (especially the central region) has increased more than that in large coastal cities. Ref. [12] further established a model to confirm that when skill is a scarce resource, the increase in the supply of college graduates caused by the expansion of university enrollment will increase the higher education premium for older groups and reduce that of the younger groups. These conclusions are also strong support for those who hold a negative attitude towards the expansion policy. ...
... Moreover, this paper contributes to a strand of the literature about the effect of increasing human capital. Previous articles have focused on total factor productivity [12], skill-biased technology adoption [29], and college premium [11,30]. The paper cuts in from the perspective of industrial enterprise innovation and observes the significance of this indicator. ...
The effect of human capital on corporate innovation varies with the distribution of human capital intensity among industries. To analyze this heterogenous effect, we utilized the variation of college enrollment expansion across different regions in China as an exogenous human capital shock. Using a sample of Chinese industrial enterprises from 1998 to 2008 and the difference-in-difference strategy, we found that industries with intensive human capital significantly increase the number of patent applications after the expansion policy. The effect is pronounced in invention patents and significantly positive in exporting and capital-intensive corporates. As for the channels, corporates in these industries are apt to adopt new technologies and increase R&D expenditures. Moreover, the agglomeration of new graduates accelerates knowledge spillover, thus promoting innovation in knowledge-intensive industries. In sum, this paper verifies the importance of policy intervention on skilled labor supply towards corporate innovation and supports the talent introduction plan of local government in China.
... Previous studies that use the quasi-experimental nature of this policy change have examined the expansion's effects on employment or earnings. For example, using the 2000 and 2005 Census data, Wu and Zhao [40] and Li, Whalley, and Xing [41] both use a difference-in-differences (DiD) method to compare trends in labor market outcomes for young and older college graduates from 2000 to 2005. The former study [40] finds that the expansion increases college graduates' unemployment probabilities by 3-5 percentage points and decrease their hourly earnings by 10 percent. ...
... (The 2000 Census dataset does not contain earnings information, and Wu and Zhao [40] replace it with comparable survey data that conducted in 2002 to estimate the expansion's earnings effect). The latter study [41] concludes that the expansion increases college graduates' unemployment rates by 6-9 percentage points. Xing, Yang, and Li [42] update this line of research by adding the 2010 Census data and reach similar conclusion: the expansion has negative impacts on college graduates' employment probability, but the magnitude of that negative effect is smaller in 2010 than that in 2005. ...
China initiated a large-scale higher education expansion program in 1999. During the first three years of the expansion, postsecondary enrollment nationwide doubled. Leveraging the quasi-experimental nature of the program, I link administrative records on province-year level college admission quotas with individuals’ education and labor market information in 2013 from the Chinese Household Income Project, and employ a two-way fixed-effect model to estimate the expansion’s impacts on individuals’ education and labor market outcomes, and then use the expansion-induced variation in college access as an instrument for college education to estimate causal returns to college. Results show that the expansion substantially boosts individuals’ education outcomes, including completed years of schooling, and the probabilities of attending college and obtaining any postsecondary degrees. The expansion also improves individuals’ labor market outcomes, including probability of working, job stability, and hourly wage. My 2-stage least squares estimators imply that returns to education remain substantial in 2013. Returns to attending college and obtaining any postsecondary degrees are estimated to be 54–76 and 59–90 percent respectively. My analysis reinforces that enhanced access to college could raise individuals’ educational attainment and boost nations’ average level of human capital, and eventually benefit their labor market outcomes.
... Second, our findings contribute to the growing empirical literature on the effect of the college enrollment expansion policy in China. Previous analyses have mainly focused on the effect of this policy on employment, income, household consumption, and industrial productivity (Che & Zhang, 2018;Li et al., 2017;Ma, Ji, & Xing, 2017;Wu & Zhao, 2010;Xing & Li, 2011;Yang & Chen, 2009). The positive effect on health and health behaviors suggests a long-term benefit of college enrollment expansion policy for China's economic and social developments, which has not been considered before. ...
... Existing literature on this topic mainly focuses on its influence on the labor market. For example, Wu and Zhao (2010) and Xing and Li (2011) test whether the policy affects the unemployment rate of college graduates. Li et al. (2017) and Ma et al. (2017) estimate how the policy affects the rate of return of higher education. ...
By exploiting the massive college enrollment expansion in China beginning in 1999, we investigate the effect of higher education on health and health behaviors. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies in 2018 and employing an instrumental variable approach, we find that higher education has a significant effect on health and health behaviors. Each additional year of education increases the probability of reporting good health and having good memory by 1.9 and 3.1 percentage points (pp), respectively. Moreover, it decreases the probability of being overweight , smoking, and drinking by 1.3, 2.3, and 1.2 pp., respectively. By comparing the effect size with the findings in previous literature, we conclude that the effect of education on health is greater at higher levels of education. Further analysis suggests that education may affect health and health behaviors through two channels: the resources acquired by individuals and the prices faced by them.
... The expansion began as an attempt to alleviate the economic crisis and became the fastest expansion in human history (Levin, 2010). The expansion sharply increased the unemployment rate among young Did Better Colleges Bring Better Job? Current Issues in Comparative Education 167 college 1 graduates (S. Li, Whalley & Xing, 2014). Meanwhile, the economic downturn and staggered industry development greatly decreased the demand to absorb labor forces, especially those who newly entered the labor force with limited work experience and unguaranteed productivity (Bai, 2006). ...
... The impact of unemployment on highly educated individuals is different compared to other educational groups, due to the unique characteristics of this category of labor force, their high expectations, as well as the financial resources already invested in their education and development. Recent research has proved that unemployment has devastating negative effects on the lives of highly educated individuals [21,22]. ...
The aim of this research is to analyze, from a macro-economic perspective, the dynamic relationship between higher education and the unemployment rate in Romania. After the political changes at the end of 1989, in Romania the number of individuals enrolled in universities and the number of highly educated graduates increased substantially. Through the research carried out in this article, we analyze whether this explosion of highly educated individuals is sustainable and is a factor in the evolution of the unemployment rate, specifically, whether higher education causes a short and/or a long-run decrease or increase of the unemployment rate, or whether the variables are independent. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) procedure, and other econometric techniques specific to the dynamic analysis of time series were used as methodological approaches. The results prove that, at the macro-economic level, higher education and unemployment rate are not co-integrated in the long-run. However, for the analyzed period, there was a significant but modest short-run positive effect of higher education on unemployment rate. Our study emphasizes the importance, for a balanced and sustainable labor market, of correlating the number of individuals enrolled in higher education institutions with the needs of employers. We underline that a non-sustainable increase in the number of highly educated graduates may become a cause of the increase of unemployment and permanent migration of highly educated individuals. The obtained results can be useful for policy makers and can contribute to the development of effective strategies focused on higher education.
... The structure of the polity and economy of China may therefore not necessarily be conducive to the demand for graduates, at least in the generic form that characterizes business schools and schools of public policy, which tend to be rather similar irrespective of location (see more on the issues below). So far, the supply shock of education and of graduates has failed to create its own demand, and China struggles to translate long-term growth plans into a transformation of its socio-economic fabric (Li et al. 2014). In addition, the last decade's geopolitical and geoeconomic confrontations have fostered a policy which draws less on international exchange and more on national self-reliance. ...
... Research studies report that the growing competition in the labour market around the world (Cheng 2015;Li, Whalley, and Xing 2014) is caused by the recent economic slowdown, which has resulted in stalling economies, high unemployment rates and job insecurityall of which have combined and significantly challenge graduate employment across all levels of education within the last decades. Santos (2020) describes these external force-based challenges as contextual and labour market boundaries. ...
This article explores the employment experiences of government scholarship graduates from one master’s degree programme at a flagship university in Kazakhstan. Analysis of interviews with graduates of a master’s degree programme designed in response to a national policy agenda shows that graduates encountered numerous challenges transitioning from university to work despite obtaining a degree from a top Kazakhstani university. The key challenges included limited employment opportunities, hostile attitudes toward younger graduates, difficult working conditions and employers’ misunderstanding of the new master’s programmes. We argue that despite significant government financial investment in education, a weak enabling support system hinders graduates’ career advancement and results in job mismatch and underutilization of skills. We suggest that policymakers need to shift debates on human capital development and graduate employability from supply-side factors to a more comprehensive model in which graduate employment is supported through the collaboration of the higher education system, industry, policymakers and graduates themselves.
... Finally, we investigate the effects of the large university reform implemented in 1999 [55]. Although the central government's education policy had increased the number of people with a college degree from 0.4 million to 1.08 million from 1978 to 1998, the expansion in 1999 resulted in an increase of newly admitted students by around 40% [55,56]. People in China typically enroll in higher education at age 18 [55]. ...
In this paper, we present evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment of the effects of the Chinese one-child policy on adults in China who were born just before and after the introduction of the policy. We measure risk, uncertainty, and time preferences, as well as subjects' preferences in the social domain, i.e., concerning competitiveness, cooperation, and bargaining. We sampled people from three Chinese provinces born both before and after the introduction of the policy in 1979. We utilize the fact that the one-child policy was introduced at different times and with different degrees of strictness in different provinces. Overall, we find a statistically significant effect only on risk and uncertainty aversion and not on any other preferences in the experiments: Those born after the introduction of the one-child policy are less risk and uncertainty averse. These results hold for various robustness checks and heterogeneity tests. Hence, our results do not confirm the general wisdom and stereotype of only-children in China being "little emperors."
... Numerous studies have been conducted regarding the employment of university graduates, including the study by S Li et al. 19 in China that through development policies, the probability of easily attending the high school students to the colleges has been increased. Pursuant to this policy, the unemployment rate of university graduates has been increased. ...
The increasing young population of Iran and the subsequent increase in the unemployment rate in recent years make the government adopt temporary policies to solve the unemployment problem. Establishing private universities and increasing the capacity of university admissions in higher education are among these policies. Although these policies can reduce the youth unemployment problem temporarily, it leads to an influx of highly educated people in the labor market in the long term. Creating job opportunities for these young people will be more difficult, which requires the extensive cooperation of universities and higher education institutions to train student entrepreneurs. Hence, in this present study, the employment of university graduates is simulated through system dynamics approach. Then using the experimental design method, sensitivity analysis and optimization of variables are performed. In the following, identifying the variables influencing the employment of university graduates, scenarios are introduced regarding dynamic universities in youth employment.
... Huang et al. (2022) argue that the 1999 higher education expansion can serve as a natural experiment to identify suitable IVs for educational attainment because it was announced suddenly, without any public consultation, and colleges and universities were only given a few months to prepare for a 47 percent intake surge. The higher education expansion policy has been treated as an exogenous shock in examining the effect of education on socioeconomic development in China (Li et al., 2014;Wang, 2021). ...
We examine the causal relationship between education and health among migrants using data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey. Our identification strategy exploits exogenous changes in compulsory schooling laws and expansion in China’s higher education sector. We find that an additional year of education causes a 2.6 percentage point increase in the mean self-reported health scores of less-educated migrants, but has no significant effect on the self-reported health scores of better-educated migrants. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that this result is driven by the effect of education on health for women and migrants residing in rural areas. We find that for less-educated migrants, the relationship between education and health is mediated by the positive effects of education on health awareness, healthcare utilization, health behaviours and income. We conclude by emphasising the implications of our findings for investing in social policies that result in better health outcomes.
... In the post-reform period, both employers and employees have gained autonomy in the job matching process, for which the graduates' location choice is a crucial aspect. Understanding this aspect is becoming essential as youth unemployment among college graduates has increased in recent decades, especially after the sharp higher education expansion in the late 1990s (Freeman, 2010;Li et al., 2011;Li et al., 2014;Ou and Zhao, 2022). Existing studies have given attention to various aspects of youth employment, such as labor force participation, employment status, occupation, and wages, but little has been done to examine the correlation between education location and job location choice upon graduation. ...
Based on a representative survey of new college graduates in China, we present a job location choice model that allows for a self‐selection effect in college regions by considering region‐dependent heterogeneous preference for job locations and unobservable location features. We also treat endogenous housing costs using the method developed by Berry et al. (1995). Our estimation results show that college education significantly increases graduates' likelihood of working in the city where their college is located. However, a model that does not consider the self‐selection effect overestimates this impact. The impact of college location on a graduate's migration decision varies considerably across cities. There is significant heterogeneity between students from universities of different tiers and rural versus urban areas. Meanwhile, the graduates show a marked home preference when choosing their job locations, and they tend to avoid working in cities with high housing costs. These findings shed light on debates on place‐based higher education policies and spatial distribution of human capital with a high level of education.
... Currently, the unemployed are graduates of elementary to high school, but many are also undergraduates. It can be said that unemployment often occurs in educated people (Li et al., 2014). According to statistics from the Central Statistics Agency, some of the unemployed in Indonesia have a Diploma/Academic education or are college graduates. ...
The economic difficulties in 1998 with the monetary crisis that occurred in the transformation era caused a lot of unemployment in various places in Indonesia. The cause of this high unemployment is the imbalance of fairly high population growth with the few available jobs. This research then aims to see how entrepreneurship lectures for students can influence entrepreneurial interest. This research will be carried out using quantitative methods. Existing data will be analyzed using descriptive analysis and multiple linear regression. This study found that entrepreneurship lectures influenced students’ interest in doing entrepreneurship. The effects of this lecture are divided into two, namely the lecture material and how to deliver the material. The lecture material directly influences student interest, while the way this material is delivered does not directly affect student interest in entrepreneurship.
... This assertion has only partially been explored as a number of authors have studied the impact of educational expansion on various policy-relevant aspects. This includes impact on the labour market (Li, Whalley, & Xing, 2014;Knight, Deng, & Li, 2017;Li, Ma, Meng, Qiao, & Shi, 2017;Xing, 2018;Yang, 2018;Huang & Zhu, 2020;Dai, Cai, & Zhu, 2021), inequality (Meng, Shen, & Xue, 2013), rural children's schooling (Lu & Zhang, 2019), intergenerational education mobility (Guo, Song, & Chen, 2019) and social mobility (Chan & Zhang, 2021), among others. However, the effect of education policy on scientific publications has not attracted the same level of attention in the literature. ...
China has seen a massive higher education expansion, which the literature has dated to the 1999–2008 period with quantitative and qualitative outcomes. However, the consequences for the publication success of Chinese authors worldwide are not well studied. We review the respective Chinese higher education policies and document the dramatic rise in publication success, with a focus on the field of Economics. A substantial set of regressions and robustness checks confirm the understanding that the higher education expansion has indeed let to a substantial worldwide rise in scientific publications in refereed economics journals fueled by the general incentives of the reform, through research collaborations and other quality improving factors.
... Harmon, Oosterbeek, & Walker, 2003;Psacharopoulos & Patrinos, 2018. 2 Other studies using quasi-experimental methods have focused on the effect of Great HE expansion on the employment of college graduates. They find that while the expansion increased the unemployment of new college graduates in the short-run, this effect mostly vanishes after 5 year (see e. g., Li, Whalley, & Xing, 2014;Xing, Yang, & Li, 2018). 3 Recent studies have also presented descriptive evidence of the impact of the compulsory school reform on assortative marriage and income inequality (Nie & Xing, 2019) and intergenerational education mobility (Cui, Liu, & Zhao, 2019;Guo, Song, & Chen, 2019). ...
China experienced a near 5-fold increase in annual Higher Education (HE) enrolment in the decade starting in 1999. Using the China Household Finance Survey, we show that the Great HE Expansion has exacerbated a large pre-existing urban-rural gap in educational attainment underpinned by the hukou (household registration) system. We instrument the years of schooling with the interaction between urban hukou status during childhood and the timing of the expansion – in essence a difference-in-differences estimator using rural students to control for common time trends. We find that the Great HE raised earnings by 17% for men and 12% for women respectively, allowing for county fixed-effects. These Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) estimates, which are robust to additional controls for hukou status at birth fully interacted with birth hukou province, can be interpreted as the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) of education on earnings for urban students who enrolled in HE only because of the Great HE Expansion. For the selected subsample of respondents with parental education information, we find that the 2SLS returns for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds are at least as high as their more advantaged counterparts, for both genders.
... For example, the New Rural Pension scheme (NRPS) was implemented in 2009 in rural China, it is expected that receiving public pension benefits may enhance the well-being of individuals at older age, while it might also affect the labor supply of pensioner or intra-household prime-age adults (Cheng 2014;Zhang 2015;Liu et al. 2016;Liu 2017;Ma 2020). In additions, the Higher Education Expansion Policy (HEEP) was published in 1999, it might affect the college enrollment of students, employment and wage of college graduates (He 2009;Wu and Zhao 2010;Xing and Li 2011;Yao et al. 2014). When there maintains the gender role segregation in household and workplace, the influences of these policy or institutional changes on employment and wage may differ by gender. ...
... The existing empirical studies demonstrate that the return to education in Chinese society varies significantly across generations, gender, region, and periods of time (Wu and Xie, 2003;Fleisher and Wang, 2005;Ren and Miller, 2012). In particular, China's higher education expansion increases the unemployment rate among college graduates who have a high level of education without a high level of income (Li et al., 2014). Therefore, we used these two indicators of socioeconomic status separately to investigate how the perception of food safety problems varies across the different levels of education and income. ...
In China, the public has gradually shifted their focus from GDP growth to quality-of-life issues, which imposes new challenges for the government. The food safety problem, as a salient issue, is one such example. This article analyzes how food safety problems affect ordinary Chinese people's trust in the government and their attribution of governmental responsibility using nationally representative survey data. As food safety risks are unequally distributed in China, the political impact of food safety problems varies among people of different socioeconomic statuses. The results show that food safety problems weaken the public's trust in both the central and local governments, but this negative effect is attenuated among people with a low level of education. Moreover, the Chinese public tends to attribute major responsibility to the central government rather than local governments when perceiving the severity of food safety problems, and this tendency becomes stronger for the low-income population. The results deepen the understanding of the local-central political trust patterns and the political implications of food safety problems in China.
... However, several pieces of research suggested the determinants of demand for higher education and had documented the trend of unequal access to college in China (Wu and Zhang 2010; Li et al. 2014). The proportion of students from economically disadvantaged areas and low-income families in Chinese higher education has not increased (Li, 2010). ...
... Harmon et al. (2003), and Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2018). 2 Other studies using quasi-experimental methods have focused on the effect of HE expansion on the employment of college graduates. They find that while the expansion increased the unemployment of new college graduates in the short-run, this effect mostly vanishes after 5 year (see e.g., Li et al. (2014) and Xing et al. (2018)). ...
... An expanding system needs to seek diversified funding sources to cover the increasing expenditures, which would force the universities to reach out to industries and private sectors. However, the expansion of enrollment was not only a direct response from higher education but also a rather urgent request from the central government (Li et al., 2014;Wan, 2006;Wang & Liu, 2011) which initiated a series of policies, laws, and regulations that encouraged local government and private entities' participation. The reforms of China's administrative system emphasize streamlined administration and delegated power to bottom-level government. ...
This chapter argues for the importance of a comparative perspective on the academic profession, as higher education globally assumes an increasingly central role in the knowledge society and economy. We begin with an overview of the surge in empirical research on the academic profession over the past three decades and culminate with an introduction to the APIKS project: the Academic Profession in the Knowledge-Based Society. The project, involving research teams from 22 countries across 5 continents, designed and executed surveys of the academic profession in 2019–2020, including their role, working conditions, career trajectories and prospects, and the changing pressures and expectations for contributing to economic growth and social betterment through research, teaching, and external activities. Sampling and survey processes, including planning and design and datafile management, are described. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges of conducting a large-scale comparative survey and considers the project’s likely future directions.
... An expanding system needs to seek diversified funding sources to cover the increasing expenditures, which would force the universities to reach out to industries and private sectors. However, the expansion of enrollment was not only a direct response from higher education but also a rather urgent request from the central government (Li et al., 2014;Wan, 2006;Wang & Liu, 2011) which initiated a series of policies, laws, and regulations that encouraged local government and private entities' participation. The reforms of China's administrative system emphasize streamlined administration and delegated power to bottom-level government. ...
China’s “opening” policy brought her lasting economic growth over the last four decades and pushed her to become a major contributor to technology and science innovations. This chapter introduces China’s effort in investing in knowledge through the channel of higher education institutions, through the perspective of China’s talent policies. We found that higher education institutions can serve as human capital banks that create, store, and utilize talents for innovations in the knowledge economy. The active participation of other stakeholders steers the direction of research and teaching activities within higher education, which may sometimes lead to an overemphasis on short-term products and a segregated academic labor market at the cost of long-term academic productivity and total efficiency of knowledge generation. We suggest that China make more effort to build an open and sustainable academic environment, which would eventually boost the innovation-led economy via the talents that have been cultivated, recruited, and retained by higher education institutions.
... Gross enrolment rates in higher education among 18-22-year-old rose from 9.8 per cent in 1998 to 24 per cent in 2009, with nearly 30 million students enrolled in higher education institutions in 2009 (Wang & Liu, 2011). Existing studies have focused on the effect that the higher education expansion policy had on the (short-term) unemployment rate among young university graduates (Li et al., 2014;Xing et al., 2018); total factor productivity in industries using more human capital intensive technologies (Che & Zhang, 2018); wage returns to education (Gao & Smyth, 2015); and intergenerational education mobility (Guo et al., 2019). We extend this literature to consider the effect on homeownership and housing wealth. ...
We utilise the implementation of the 1999 higher education expansion in China as a natural experiment to examine the relationship between university educational attainment, homeownership and housing wealth. Using data from the 2018 China Family Panel Studies, results from our preferred models, which correct for endogeneity, suggest that having a university qualification generates a 3.5-6.3 percentage points increase in the probability of homeownership and a 24.3-51.1 percentage points increase in total housing wealth. We also find that holding a university qualification increases the number of houses one owns and housing wealth for those whose housing wealth is above the median. We find that self-reported social status and entitlement to superannuation are channels through which higher education affects homeownership and housing wealth and that financial literacy is a channel through which higher education affects housing wealth. We find considerable heterogeneity in the impact of higher education on housing outcomes across gender, family income levels, parent education and between urban and rural areas.
... In recent years, China has launched a series of initiatives for rural students in order to address class inequity in higher education (Lu 2013). However, researchers still report the under-representation of rural students in universities and point out that a large percentage of rural students already dropped out before taking the college entrance examination due to various forms of exclusion in education (e.g., Fish 2010;Li et al. 2015;Li, Whalley, and Xing 2014). ...
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VUM5QMB9GKASQZNVNIRC/full?target=10.1080/01425692.2021.1962244
Drawing on a broader study that focused on understanding rural college students for equity and personal growth in higher education, this paper presents Ying’s story of learning and living as a female college student from rural China. Adopting the thinking tools of habitus and reflexivity, the paper aims to understand the constraints Ying has gone through in China’s higher education and her various response amidst them. The findings illustrate how the intersectionality of rural dispositions and gender has put her at a disadvantage and how she constantly mediates her surroundings through internal conversations. The paper discusses the intricate interplay between habitus and reflexivity during the mediation. The conclusion affirms the relevance of both habitus and reflexivity in our understanding of the rural student’s educational experiences and argues for the role of education and society in challenging the social structure and promoting social change.
... Employment in China was divided into formal and informal sectors (Xue, Gao and Guo, 2014 (Esmail and Shili, 2017). However, the country still grapples with some levels of unemployment (Li, Whalley and Xing, 2014). This is a challenge that threatens to slow down the economic growth of this country. ...
Total factor productivity (TFP) refers to the level of efficiency in using production factors which include labor and capital. These factors, which originate from TFP, have been presented in China for the past two decades. In this regard, the current study aimed to investigate the contribution of TFP to the Chinese economy. More precisely, it focused on accomplishing other recent studies on this area and demonstrating the misallocation of resources on TFP limitations influenced on Chinese economy. The designation of resources in the country has been noted to alter the TFP level. Similarly, a reduction in the government regulation of industries plays a role in increasing TFP in the Chinese economy. The findings of this study indicated that the growth of the Chinese economy in the past was highly driven by the capital with a limited emphasis on labor and technological investments.
Attaining a college education bestows advantages in the labor market, but it is undetermined whether a college education could also benefit those in need of assistance. Using a unique dataset from a large online medical crowdfunding platform based in China, this paper investigates the social support returns to college education. Our study finds that patients attaining college education would raise 88.1% more funds through medical crowdfunding. A variety of identification strategies suggest that the relationship is causal. By examining the potential mechanism, we conclude that college-educated patients have more detailed narratives and have more school-related social connections who are willing to verify and distribute the campaigns, attracting more supporters and ultimately raising more funds.
China’s higher education expansion policy implemented in 1999 has substantially increased higher education opportunities. This paper investigates whether rural students do benefit more from the expansion policy and achieve educational equity between urban and rural areas. Based on the four waves of nationwide micro survey data, collected in 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015, we find that the expansion policy increases the rural-urban gap in higher education participation in the short- and medium-term, but reduces the educational inequality in the long-term. However, when we examine the impact of the expansion policy on access to elite higher education, the results show that the expansion policy is not conducive to reducing the rural-urban gap in elite higher education participation. Therefore, to achieve educational equity between rural and urban areas, compensation policies should be designed to benefit rural students.
Introduction. The explosive growth of tertiary education around the world calls attention to how this affects the employment of young graduates.
Aim. The current research paper is aimed to analyse how the growth of young people’s participation in tertiary education is reflected in the change of their employment and economic activity.
Methodology and research methods . The comparative and correlation analysis was used to examine the relationship between changes in the education attainment of young people and the dynamics of employment and economic activity indicators by levels of education. The article deals with educational statistics data from OECD countries, Russia and some other countries participating in OECD educational research.
Results. The results of the analysis presented in the article show that the growth of tertiary education leads to an increase in the unemployment rate among the young population; however, this is true only for the least advanced programmes, while there is an increase in the employment rate for master’s degree graduates. Economic activity among young graduates with a master’s degree grew faster after the 2009 crisis than among graduates of other tertiary education programmes. Master’s degree graduates were in a better position during the crisis of 2020 caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scientific novelty. The authors presented a detailed analysis of the growth in the scale of tertiary education and the changes of status in the labour market indicators of graduates of different tertiary education programmes.
Practical significance of the study lies in the development of the information and analytical basis for adjusting further policy in the field of development of tertiary education based on the goal of increasing youth employment.
Marriage matching markets typically involve heterogenous agents participating in a dynamic, non-stationary environment. These features pose a considerable modeling challenge. In this paper, we develop a new parametric model of dynamic marriage that allows for market non-stationarity using a system of transitionary equilibria. We propose a method to identify and parametrically estimate the model by representing the model equilibrium with a fixed-point mapping. We apply our model to investigate how China’s One-Child Policy has affected the marriage distribution through its effect on the population and sex ratios.
China's higher education expansion has led to significant changes in younger generations' educational investments and labor market outcomes, and this trend is expected to continue due to the recent post-graduate education expansion in response to economic challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the impact of higher education expansion on labor market participants' choices, beliefs, and learning effects through an extended education signaling model, and uncovers the behavioral patterns in response to this policy change using a laboratory experiment. We find that subjects playing the role of workers generally follow a threshold strategy, and the changes in their effort investments and received wages after the enrollment expansion are consistent with the theoretical prediction. Using a hierarchical clustering method, we estimate different types of empirical strategies adopted by the subjects. In the low-enrollment treatment, the three types of empirical strategies are more distinct, and there is a strong tendency for effort over-investment by low-ability workers and under-investment by high-ability workers. In the high-enrollment treatment, the distinction between the estimated strategy types becomes much smaller. An analysis using elicited beliefs suggests that effort over-investment stems from workers' inconsistent beliefs regarding firms' wage offers — this inconsistency persists even in the last few periods of the game. Our findings provide a belief-based explanation for the discussion on over-education and are of great policy relevance.
In this paper we present causal evidence on the impact of higher education expansion on crime by exploiting a massive expansion of college enrollment in China since 1999, using data from multiple sources. Our identification strategy exploits regional variation in the intensity of the higher education expansion with partially identified difference-in-differences models. We explore various assumptions to account for the potential unparallel trends over years and find that college expansion causally reduces crime rates and the effect changes over time. Moreover, the crime reducing effect extends beyond the post-secondary educational level and into the senior high schools. Our findings document an important yet overlooked positive externality associated with higher education expansion.
This paper explores whether the expansion of higher education can influence attitudes regarding gender norms. I evaluate the impact of China’s higher education expansion since 1999. The results show that the reform has significantly increased higher educational attainment for both women and men. However, women’s progressive views on gender roles are negatively affected following the expansion. The erosion of women’s egalitarian ideology can be attributed to the findings that women’s opportunities in the labor market are worsening relative to those of men. The results are significantly driven by married women and people who live in areas with a high male-to-female sex ratio. Practical conditions in the labor market and at home may adversely affect women’s ability to fulfill egalitarian gender roles.
This study examines the heterogeneous effect of higher education on intergenerational mobility of rural and urban residents before and after China's higher education expansion (CHEE). Drawing on data from seven waves of the China General Social Survey (CGSS), we find that, although the overall effect of higher education decreases on alleviating intergenerational persistence after CHEE, undergraduate or postgraduate education can still significantly promote rural intergenerational mobility in terms of occupational-socioeconomic status. However, higher education appears to have changed from assisting social mobility to advancing intergenerational persistence in urban areas after CHEE. The propensity score matching method was used to mitigate sample selection bias, and all the findings were validated by several robustness checks, including placebo and Oster's (2019) omitted-variable tests.
Over the past several decades, the returns to college education have steadily increased in many countries of the world despite an increased supply of college graduates. In this paper, using local-labor market data on the composition of the labor force combined with detailed firm-level data covering the period of a large-scale expansion of college enrollment in China, we seek to identify within-firm adjustments to labor market changes. The empirical work is guided by a model in which there are two types of production technologies, characterized by two different types of capitals, one skill-biased and the other labor-biased. The empirical results, consistent with the model and the observed trends in schooling and rates of return, indicate that there were significant adjustments in capital and R&D within-firms in response to an enlarged college-educated labor force.
Using the Enterprise Survey for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China (ESIEC) 2018 database, we estimate the effect of the higher education of entrepreneur on firm performance. The expansion of higher education in China that began in 1999 is considered as an exogenous shock to identify causal effects. We find (1) that college education of entrepreneur significantly increases the total factor productivity of firms; (2) that college education of entrepreneur significantly increases the probability of innovation; and (3) that college education of entrepreneur significantly increases the likelihood that firms will gain policy supports from governments. The estimation results suggest that the increasing human capital of entrepreneurs is an important driving force for productivity growth in China. The study has policy implications for both higher education expansion and entrepreneurship.
We examine the impact of China's higher education expansion on labor market outcomes for young college graduates using China's 2005 1 Percent Population Sample Survey. Exploiting variations in the expansion of university places across provinces and high school cohorts between 1999 and 2003, we apply a difference‐in‐differences model and take into account the demand‐side effect by using the Bartik index. We find that the expansion of higher education in China decreased unemployment rates among males and college graduates in the short term. However, the policy decreased women's labor force participation and individual earnings in high‐skilled white‐collar jobs. We further discuss potential channels affecting the outcomes that were observed. Our results illustrate the broad economic benefits of higher education. The findings shed new light on the contribution of young skilled labor in the economic growth of China and call for policies that can alleviate the short‐term negative impact of higher education on individual students and maximize human capital. Our study also provides an interesting example of the consequences of the unequal expansion of higher education opportunities on the labor market of an emerging economy.
This paper investigates the impact of higher education on corporate innovation. To establish causality, we exploit a policy-induced exogenous shock in the supply of Chinese college-educated labor starting in 2003. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that Chinese firms in skilled industries generate better innovation outcomes as measured by patents and citations than those in unskilled industries. This effect is more pronounced among firms headquartered in a province with more science and engineering college graduates, young firms that are more likely to hire young graduates, and firms located near universities. Moreover, higher education expansion increases a firm's innovative human capital in terms of the number of educated employees and inventors. Finally, we show that technological innovation is a mechanism through which higher education affects productivity growth and, thus, the economy.
Objective: This study was conducted to determine the factors affecting the perceived stress levels of university students during the coronavirus outbreak process. Materials and Methods: The study was carried out with students of a university located in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey between January 2021 to February 2021.The research was completed with 728 students.Questionnaires of the data were prepared with Google Forms and collected with the link address sent to the individuals.In data collection, "Questions Regarding Students' Socio-Demographical Characteristics" and "Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)" were used. Frequency and percentage calculation, independent groups t test and one-way anova test were used to evaluate data. Results: It was determined that the students averaged 10.33±3.80 in perceived stress, 5.50±2.32 in perceived coping, and 15.84±5.19 in total. It was determined that most of the participants of the study were women between the ages of 21-23 who had low income, did not have any chronic diseases, and were hopeful about life. Conclusion: It was determined that the participants' perceived stress scale total score averages were at a moderate level.A significant relationship was found between the age, gender, income status, parental attitude, hopeful outlook on life, and educational status of the students participating in the study and their perceived stress levels. Keywords: COVID-19, University students.Pandemic, Stress.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to offer direct tests of the effectiveness of renaming vocational education and training (VET) in enhancing the image and popularity of the subject. Although many proponents of renaming argue that the word “vocational” is associated with lower levels of skills and knowledge and should therefore be supplemented by better recognised words, empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of this strategy is scant.
Design/methodology/approach
This study exploits a rare policy change in Hong Kong, where VET was renamed as vocational and professional education and training (VPET) and conducted an original survey experiment of 1,004 parents in the city to test if the new name would improve respondents' perceptions of the subject.
Findings
The findings reveal a complex picture regarding the effects of renaming. Although renaming does not seem to improve the overall popularity of vocational education, it may widen the support base for vocational education by diluting its class character. Specifically, while attitudes toward VET are significantly and negatively correlated with family income, no such association is found in regard to VPET.
Originality/value
This paper offers the first direct and comprehensive test of the effectiveness of renaming vocational education – a popular policy suggestion in many countries. Its findings complicate conventional expectations and contribute to the study of educational preferences in advanced economies.
Objective: This study was conducted to determine the factors affecting the perceived stress levels of university students during the coronavirus outbreak process.
Materials and Methods: The study was carried out with students of a university located in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey between January 2021 to February 2021.The research was completed with 728 students.Questionnaires of the data were prepared with Google Forms and collected with the link address sent to the individuals.In data collection, "Questions Regarding Students' Socio-Demographical Characteristics" and "Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)" were used. Frequency and percentage calculation, independent groups t test and one-way anova test were used to evaluate data.
Results: It was determined that the students averaged 10.33±3.80 in perceived stress, 5.50±2.32 in perceived coping, and 15.84±5.19 in total. It was determined that most of the participants of the study were women between the ages of 21-23 who had low income, did not have any chronic diseases, and were hopeful about life.
Conclusion: It was determined that the participants' perceived stress scale total score averages were at a moderate level.A significant relationship was found between the age, gender, income status, parental attitude, hopeful outlook on life, and educational status of the students participating in the study and their perceived stress levels.
The sociological study of inequalities has long been concerned with questions concerning the role of education in creating a fairer society and whether it just serves as a means for the advantaged to consolidate pre-existing privileges. This thesis adds to the existing literature by addressing the questions of how family background, types of high school, college entrance scores, and participation in the alternative admissions scheme – Independent Freshman’s Admission (IFA) – help structure access to tertiary education in Beijing, China. I examine tertiary education in terms of both university prestige and choice of university major. Using a mixed-methods study, I draw on qualitative data from my fieldwork in Beijing where I interviewed 60 first-year students and 2 admissions tutors, drawn from across seven universities of different levels of prestige, with both STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and non-STEM subject majors. I also analyse quantitative data from the 2009 Beijing College Student Panel Study (BCSPS) consisting of 4771 students from 15 universities (3 elite, 6 selective and 6 less-selective universities). First, my qualitative analysis reveals the important role of residential background and hukou status, as well as key- point school attendance in university admission of students both through Gaokao route and IFA participation. I also explored some of the reasons behind female students’ uptake of a STEM degree. Second, using multinomial logit models for analysing BCSPS data, I confirmed the importance of family background, residence of origin and school attendance for access to universities of different levels of prestige. Further, using logistic regression, I showed gender differences in personal attributes relevant to the pursuit of STEM fields, but no associations between different beliefs about marriage and family and educational choices. Taken, together, these findings uncover the ongoing importance of institutional barriers in accessing elite and selective tertiary education in China and illustrate how the meritocratic policy objectives of IFA were undermined in practice. In moving forwards, now that IFA has been scrapped, my study suggests that, without a marked change of direction, the conflict will continue between meritocratic principles and elitist goals, and the quest to improve equality in region, class and gender will remain elusive.
This paper proposes and estimates three novel higher education indices for 31 Chinese provinces: i) the Chinese Higher Education Density Index (CHEDI) to analyze the evolution of the quantitative distribution of higher education institutions (HEIs) in each province from 2001 to 2017, which is further decomposed into subgroups based on the type of college, i.e., four-year undergraduate colleges, two-year vocational colleges, and private institutions; ii) the Chinese Higher Education Quality Index (CHEQI) to examine the supply of higher education in terms of quality using a university ranking system; and iii) the Chinese Higher Education Index (CHEI), a composite indicator that incorporates both the quantity and quality dimensions of higher education institutions for each province, providing a weighted measure of the supply of higher education in China. The empirical findings indicate a significant and persistent heterogeneity in the supply of higher education between provinces. The indices identify which regions have been substantially rewarded by the higher education expansion of recent decades, going from an undersupply to a proportionate supply of higher education institutions. On the other hand, a significant share of regions still has a low supply in terms of either the quantity or quality of HEIs, or both.
In this paper, we document the lesser-known heterogeneous trends of college/non-college earnings premium across age groups from 1995 to 2013 in China. Specifically, the college premium in 2013 for the younger group (age 25–34) was about 30 percentage points, similar to the level in 1995, while the college premium in 2013 for the older group (age 45–54) increased to 50 percentage points, nearly double that of 1995. To attribute these divergent trends of the college premium to the changes in the relative size of college workers, we use the model by Card and Lemieux (2001), which incorporates imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age cohorts. Due to the distinctions of these trends in China, our identification is free of the overestimation issue that the existing studies suffer. Our results are similar to those in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Japan. Holding the age cohort and survey year constant, a one unit increase in log relative size of college workers is associated with about 10 percentage points decrease in college/non-college premium and about 18 percentage points decrease in college/high school premium. We further find that the negative effect is much more substantial among the new entrants (age 25–29) than experienced workers (age 30–54). By this pattern, we demonstrate that the new labor market entrants are more sensitive to their own cohort size and argue that the confounding ability composition effect should not be a serious issue.
This study aims to analyze the relationship between economic growth and human capital and their impact on the labor market. At first the various indicators of economic growth, human capital, and demand and supply indicators in the Algerian labor market were analyzed .
Secondly, a econometric study was conducted by testing each hypothese of the study hypotheses separately: 1- test the relationship between economic growth and human capital during the period 1970-2018 using the ARDL model and the causality test between the two variables using the Toda-Yamamoto test;2 - testing the effect of economic growth on the job market in Algeria during the period 1970-2018 by testing the asymmetric relationship between GDP and unemployment rate using the NARDL model;3 - testing the impact of human capital on the labor market by testing the impact of human capital on the unemployment rate in Algeria during the period 1970-2018 based on the ARDL model;
This study concluded the following results:
- An inverse relationship between human capital and economic growth in Algeria during the period 1970-2018;
- The existence of an asymmetric relationship in the long run between the gross domestic product and the unemployment rate in Algeria; Okun's relationship is exist in the Algerian economy and it was achieved according to the NARDL model during the period 1970-2018.
- There is inverse relationship between human capital and the unemployment rate in Algeria during the period 1970-2018.
This study investigates the causal effect of human capital on entrepreneurship. We use China’s higher-education expansion in 1999 as an exogenous shock to conduct difference-in-differences estimation and find that human capital enhances entrepreneurship significantly. Our results are robust to different specifications and measures. We provide supportive evidence based on two alternative natural experiments: China’s university relocation (1952) and the restart of the college entrance exam (1977). Plausible mechanisms that drive our results are resource acquisition, opportunity identification, and decrease in labor cost. We also find that institutional quality, trust, and financing conditions significantly strengthen our findings.
Postgraduate education in China bears the dual mission of "high-end talent supply" and "scientific and technological innovation" as delegated by the Ministry of Education of China (2017). Improve the quality of postgraduate student training and management is essential for Chinese universities to meet this requirement. This paper investigates the practical effectiveness of using a specially designed, internationally collaborative research training workshop to enhance new Chinese postgraduate students' scientific literacy and self-efficacy. The research results show that the workshop, which integrates seminar presentations and both individual and group-based student activities, is of practical significance for improving the experiences of first-year postgraduate students. The findings indicate the application of enactive mastery and vicarious learning strategies in research training workshop effectively boost students' motivation, confidence and feeling of accomplishment at their early research career, and can provide ongoing benefits to support Chinese students to further develop research skills and capabilities. The positive findings in this exploratory study can inform future research projects to examine the transferability of this research training workshop model in the broader Chinese higher education context.
Reference is made to the use of a historical approach in economics and the growth and power of modern corporations to systematize the contextual dimensions that form corporate planning practices and innovation. I show the dimension that contributes to the growth of Alibaba—the Chinese e-commerce giant in online trading of consumer products—by demonstrating that its corporate behavior and technostructure are actually aligned and interacting with the elements of an evolving social fabric. These elements include the government and its policies, social advancements in the community, and technology under a public planning policy for economic reform. As a private corporation in its own right, the ability of Alibaba to transcend the boundaries of public planning by using its own resources (especially in shadow banking activities) seems inevitable. However, in the context of an economic reform, the Chinese government clearly has the authority to reduce the gap between growing corporate power and public interests.
In recent years, China has instituted a variety of reforms to its hukou system, an institution with the power to restrict population mobility and access to state-sponsored benefits for the majority of China's rural population. A wave of newspaper stories published in late 2005 understood the latest round of reform initiatives to suggest that the hukou is set to be abolished, and that rural residents will soon be “granted urban rights.” This article clarifies the basic operations of the hukou system in light of recent reforms to examine the validity of these claims. We point out that confusion over the functional operations of the hukou system and the nuances of the hukou lexicon have contributed to the overstated interpretation of the initiative. The cumulative effect of these reforms is not abolition of the hukou, but devolution of responsibility for hukou policies to local governments, which in many cases actually makes permanent migration of peasants to cities harder than before. At the broader level, the hukou system, as a major divide between the rural and urban population, remains potent and intact.
We document and discuss the implications of a sharp increase in the regional dispersion of skill premia in China in recent years. This has previously been little noted or discussed. We use three urban household surveys for 1995, 2002, and 2007 and estimate skill premia at provincial and city levels. Results show an increase in the skill premium across all regions between 1995 and 2002, but only coastal regions show significant increases in skill premia between 2002 and 2007. For 2007, coastal regions also have much higher within region wage inequality and this contributes more to overall urban wage inequality than within region inequality of non-coastal regions. Using a fixed effects model at city level, we find that ownership restructuring is a significant factor in driving up skill premia during the first period, and that the ongoing process of China’s integration into the global economy plays a significant and regionally concentrated role in the second period.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
This paper documents the major transformation of higher education that has been underway in China since 1999 and evaluates its potential global impacts. Reflecting China's commitment to continued high growth through quality upgrading and the production of ideas and intellectual property as set out in both the 10th (2001-2005) and 11th (2006-2010) five-year plans, this transformation focuses on major new resource commitments to tertiary education and also embodies significant changes in organizational form. This focus on tertiary education differentiates the Chinese case from other countries who earlier at similar stages of development instead stressed primary and secondary education. The number of undergraduate and graduate students in China has been grown at approximately 30% per year since 1999, and the number of graduates at all levels of higher education in China has approximately quadrupled in the last 6 years. The size of entering classes of new students and total student enrollments have risen even faster, and have approximately quintupled. Prior to 1999 increases in these areas were much smaller. Much of the increased spending is focused on elite universities, and new academic contracts differ sharply from earlier ones with no tenure and annual publication quotas often used. All of these changes have already had large impacts on China's higher educational system and are beginning to be felt by the wider global educational structure. We suggest that even more major impacts will follow in the years to come and there are implications for global trade both directly in ideas, and in idea derived products. These changes, for now, seem relatively poorly documented in literature.
This working paper deals with the question how international trade can lead to economic growth. Since only technical progress can lead to sustained economic growth international trade has to accelerate the rate of technical progress to promote economic growth. Technical progress is mainly generated by the production and the use of ideas. It can be shown that international trade fosters the production of ideas in industrialised countries and that it enables the use of ideas in developing countries. Therefore international trade can promote growth at least in the short run. This is demonstrated via theoretical models and empirical evidence as well as a separate empirical analysis concerning the variety of imported capital goods.
As massive rural residents leave their home countryside for better employment, migration has profound effects on income distributions such as rural-urban income gap and inequalities within rural or urban areas. The nature of the effects depends crucially on who are migrating and their migrating patterns. In this paper, we emphasize two facts. First, rural residents are not homogeneous, they self-select to migrate or not. Second, there are significant differences between migrants who successfully transformed their hukou status (permanent migrants) and those did not (temporary migrants). Using three coordinated CHIP data sets in 2002, we find that permanent migrants are positively selected from rural population especially in terms of education. As permanent migration takes more mass from the upper half of rural income density, both rural income level and inequalities decrease, the urban-rural income ratio increases at the same time. On the contrary, the selection effect of temporary migrants is almost negligible. It does not have obvious effect on rural income level and inequalities.
The Chinese household registration system (hukou), which divides the population into “agricultural” and “nonagricultural”
sectors, may be the most important determinant of differential privileges in state socialist China, determining access to
good jobs, education for one’s children, housing, health care, and even the right to move to a city. Transforming one’s hukou
status from rural to urban is a central aspect of upward social mobility. Using data from a 1996 national probability sample,
we show that education and membership in the Chinese Communist Party are the main determinants of such mobility.
China on the Move offers a new and more thorough explanation of migration, which integrates knowledge from geography, population studies, sociology and politics; to help us understand the processes of social, political, and economic change associated with powerful migration streams so essential to Chinese development. Using a large body of research, clear and attractive illustrations (maps, tables, and charts) of findings based on census, survey and field data, and selected qualitative material such as migrants' narratives, this book provides an updated, systematic, empirically rich, multifaceted and lively analysis of migration in China.
This paper uses Chinese micro data and new semi-parametric methods to estimate the current return to college education allowing for heterogeneous returns and for self-selection into schooling based on them. OLS and IV methods do not properly account for this sorting. Our estimates suggest that, for a randomly selected young person from an urban area, college attendance leads to a 43% increase in lifetime earnings (nearly 11% annually) in 2000, compared with just 36% (nearly 9% annually) for those who do not attend. Our evidence suggests that the return to education has increased substantially in China since the early 1990s.
This study provides estimates of the returns to schooling in urban China over an extended period of economic reforms. We find a dramatic increase in the returns to education, from only 4.0 percent per year of schooling in 1988 to 10.2 percent in 2001. Most of the rise in the returns to education occurred after 1992 and reflected an increase in the wage premium for higher education. The rise is observed within groups defined by sex, work experience, region, and ownership, and is robust to the inclusion of different control variables. The timing and pattern of changing schooling returns suggest that they were influenced strongly by institutional reforms in the labor market that increased the demand for skilled labor. Journal of Comparative Economics33 (4) (2005) 730–752.
The magnitude of the interaction effect in nonlinear models does not equal the marginal effect of the interaction term, can be of opposite sign, and its statistical significance is not calculated by standard software. We present the correct way to estimate the magnitude and standard errors of the interaction effect in nonlinear models.
In the past 20 years the average real earnings of Chinese urban male workers have increased by 350 per cent. Accompanying this unprecedented growth is a considerable increase in earnings inequality. Between 1988 and 2007 the variance of log earnings increased from 0.27 to 0.48, a 78 per cent increase. Using a unique set of repeated cross-sectional data this paper examines the causes of this increase in earnings inequality. We find that the major changes occurred in the 1990s when the labour market moved from a centrally planned system to a market oriented system. The decomposition exercise conducted in the paper identifies the factor that drives the significant increase in the earnings variance in the 1990s to be an increase in the within-education-experience cell residual variances. Such an increase may be explained mainly by the increase in the price of unobserved skills. When an economy shifts from an administratively determined wage system to a market-oriented one, rewards to both observed and unobserved skills increase. The turn of the century saw a slowing down of the reward to both the observed and unobserved skills, due largely to the college expansion program that occurred at the end of the 1990s.
Report on the Development of the China Youth During the 10th and 11th 5-Year-Plan
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China Youth and Child Research Center (CYCRC) (2007). Report on the Development of the China Youth During the 10th and 11th 5-Year-Plan. (in Chinese).
Transition and development of China's education
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Yang, Dongping (2006). Transition and development of China's education. : Social Science Academic Press (in Chinese).
Guidelines for China's education reform and development
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State Council (1993). Guidelines for China's education reform and development. http://www.moe.edu.cn/edoas/website18/level3.jsp?tablename=208&infoid=
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