Distribution, Development, and Education in Taiwan, 1979?94
By African Development Bank, François Bourguignon, François Bourguignon, Martin Fournier, Mark Gurgand (01/01, En, Es)
Massive investment in poor people?s education is one of the few tools that seems to both accelerate economic growth and improve the distribution of income. This strategy has been recommended repeatedly in the development literature of the past 30 years, from the well-known Redistribution with Growth by Hollis Chenery and others in 1974 to the World Bank?s influential 1990 and 2000/2001 World Development Reports on poverty. But although an important literature has developed on education?s contributions to growth, relatively little is known about its effects on the distribution of income.
This chapter provides an empirical framework for studying the relationship between the expansion of education and the distribution of income. This framework separates changes in the distribution of individual income and earnings that can be attributed to sociodemographic changes (especially changes in education), to changes in labor force participation and occupational choices, and to changes in the structure of earnings that may result from the supply of and demand for various types of workers. All this is done at the microeconomic level based on data from household surveys.
Last updated: 04/26/07
