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41. Beyond the ABCs: Higher Education and Developing Countries

Author:
Megan Crowley and Devesh Kapur
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Abstract:
This paper analyzes a relatively neglected facet of the complex debate regarding human capital–higher (or tertiary) education. It addresses five broad questions examining higher education in developing countries. One, are the economic effects of higher education on developing countries different from those in industrialized countries, with its links with labor markets of lesser importance than its impact on institutional development? Two, how does the impact of higher education depend on the type of education and its beneficiaries? Three, with the state unable to meet growing demand pressures, what should be the proper role of the state to ensure not just quality but also equity and access? Four, how should countries rethink the provision of higher education in an "open economy" from seeking education abroad or encouraging foreign providers into the country or simply linking domestic institutions with foreign quality assurance mechanisms? And five, do new technologies offer developing countries a new paradigm to expand the provision of high quality but low cost higher education? The aim is not to provide categorical answers to these complex questions, but rather highlight the analytical and empirical lacuna with regard to each of these questions.
Topic:
Education
Political Geography:
India

42. Higher Education Reservations and India's Economic Growth: An Examination

Author:
Gurpreet Mahajan
Publication Date:
09-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Governance Innovation
Abstract:
In 2006 the Indian Parliament passed legislation reserving an additional 27 percent of seats in all institutions of higher learning, funded by the central government, for the category of socially disadvantaged groups officially known as "Other Backward Classes." At a time when India is opening its economy to global competition, this initiative has re-ignited the debate on the efficacy of reservations and triggered fresh anxieties about the impact of this policy on India's economic growth.
Topic:
Democratization, Economics, Education, and Globalization
Political Geography:
India and Asia

43. Minds on Fire: Enhancing India's Knowledge Workforce

Author:
Richard P. Adler
Publication Date:
02-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
India's economy continues to grow at a remarkable pace. The country's gross domestic product (GDP) has been expanding an average of nearly 8 percent per year since 2002. In the fiscal year ending March 2007, India's economy grew at 9.4 percent. This performance means that the Indian economy met its own national five-year growth goal for the first time since the first five-year plan was issued by the government in 1950. At its current rate of growth, India will become a trillion-dollar economy by 2007–2008 and will overtake South Korea to become Asia's third-largest economy, after China and Japan.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Education, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
Japan, India, Asia, and South Korea

44. Primary Education in India: Prospects of Meeting the MDG Target

Author:
Bernarda Zamora and Sonia Bhalotra
Publication Date:
07-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
This paper uses two large repeated cross-sections, one for the early 1990s, and one for the late 1990s, to describe growth in school enrolment and completion rates for boys and girls in India, and to explore the extent to which enrolment and completion rates have grown over time. It decomposes this growth into a component due to changes in the characteristics that determine schooling, and another associated with changes in the responsiveness of schooling to given characteristics. Our results caution against the common practice of using current data to make future projections on the assumption that the model parameters are stable. The analysis nevertheless performs illustrative simulations relevant to the question of whether India will be able to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of realising universal primary education by the year 2015. The simulations suggest that India will achieve universal attendance, but that primary school completion rates will not exhibit much progress.
Topic:
Civil Society, Development, and Education
Political Geography:
India and Asia

45. Out of School and (Probably) in Work: Child Labour and Capability Deprivation in India

Author:
D. Jayaraj and S. Subramanian
Publication Date:
08-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
This paper explores the hypothesis that the phenomenon of child labour is explicable in terms of poverty that compels a household to keep its children out of school and put them to work in the cause of the househol d's survival. In exploring the link between child labour and poverty in the Indian context, the paper advances the view that the nature of the connection is more readily apprehended if both the variables under study are defined more expansively and inclusively than is customarily the case. Specifically, the suggestion is that it may be realistic to include those children who are conventionally categorized as 'non-workers not attending school' within the count of child labourers. It is also suggested that poverty is meaningfully measured in terms of a multi-dimensional approach to the problem, wherein the aim is to assess generalized capability failure—arising from want of access to elementary infrastructural facilities and essential amenities—with respect to a number of basic human functionings. The core of the paper's argument is presented by means of a simple analytical model of child labour and deprivation, and the issues emerging from it are studied in the Indian context with the support of bot h primary and secondary data.
Topic:
Education, Human Rights, and Poverty
Political Geography:
India and Asia

46. Human Capital and the Quality of Growth

Author:
Nancy Birdsall
Publication Date:
12-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
T. W. SCHULTZ was ahead of his time, at least among economists. The earliest postwar models of development emphasized accumulation of physical capital, and saw spending on health and education as a drain on the accumulation of "productive" assets. But eventually, the newer classical growth models incorporated formally Schultz's insight, and related work on accounting for growth by Hollis Chenery and colleagues at the World Bank pointed to the contribution of more skilled workers with more human capital to increased productivity and growth. The more recent endogenous growth models are even more emphatic. Sustainable growth in these models is the result in part of positive externalities generated by education, an important form of human capital. In these models, the new ideas and new technologies that are critical to high sustained growth rely fundamentally on high levels of human capital.
Topic:
Economics, Education, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
India