Education, earnings and skills: a multi-country comparison

Colm Harmon, Kevin Denny, V. O'sullivan
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引用次数: 55

Abstract

This paper uses the measures of basic skills (or functional literacy) in the International Adult Literacy Survey to examine the impact of education and basic skills on earnings across a large number of countries. We show that the estimated return to formal education is sensitive to the inclusion of these measures: excluding them biases the return to education upwards in many countries to a significant degree, usually 1 or 2 percentage points. In almost all countries, the test scores have a well-determined effect on earnings although there is considerable variation in the size of the effect. The highest returns to skills tend to be in English speaking countries. Comparing results across countries, the returns to education and the returns to basic skills are not correlated. The evidence suggests that there is considerable benefit in many countries for policy intervention to increase the skill levels of workers. This should not just be directed at dealing with low-skilled individuals – there are gains across the skills distribution.
教育、收入和技能:多国比较
本文采用国际成人扫盲调查中的基本技能(或功能性读写能力)指标,考察了许多国家的教育和基本技能对收入的影响。我们表明,估计的正规教育回报对纳入这些措施很敏感:在许多国家,排除这些措施会使教育回报显著上升,通常为1或2个百分点。几乎在所有国家,考试成绩对收入都有明显的影响,尽管影响的大小有很大差异。技能回报最高的往往是说英语的国家。比较各国的结果,教育回报和基本技能回报并不相关。有证据表明,在许多国家,通过政策干预提高工人的技能水平会带来相当大的好处。这不应该只针对低技能的个人——在技能分配方面也有好处。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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