Education and labour force

Hierarchies of castes, economic status, gender, cultural diversities and uneven economic development deeply influence the access to and equality of education. Present study aims to identify the level and determinants of educational attainment of youth in India across socio-economic groups. The paper is based on data from the survey - “Youth in India: Situations and Needs Study”- conducted in 2006-07 in six states. Cross Tabulations and Logistic regression has been used in the analysis. The preliminary findings show that as the educational level of mother increases, a large proportion of youth attains higher secondary and above levels of education. Urban youth avail the higher secondary and above education twice more than their rural counterparts, also it is more among Hindus than the Muslims. The findings of this analysis demonstrates that improvements in socio-economic conditions are a pre-requisite for enhancing access to basic education.

I will start with the need for a new population policy paradigm that covers the concerns of ageing and shrinking populations in addition to those of growing populations. Such a new paradigm should explicitly incorporate education in addition to the conventional age and sex. It thus adds the quality dimension to the consideration of population trends and their consequences. Based on the reconstructions to 1960 and projections to 2060 by age, sex and 7 levels of educational attainment for 170 countries produced at IIASA the returns to education have been estimated for aspects ranging from economic growth, to health, democracy, vulnerability to natural disasters and adaptive capacity to climate change. The strong effect of female education on reducing high fertility makes education a key strategy (together with family planning) towards population stabilization. In the context of ageing and shrinking societies this human resource based approach suggests that higher productivity of better educated younger cohorts can compensate for their smaller number. A consistent new population policy paradigm on fostering the human resource base for sustainable development would also make the population community much more relevant for the currently ongoing policy discussions about 21st century sustainable development and climate change.

This paper attempts to measure the impact of various socio-economic variables on female labour force participation (LFP) in Kathmandu Valley- the most populous region of Nepal. Attempts have also been made to measure the rural/urban differentials and to examine how these determinants associate with female LFP. The data from the Nepal Labour Force Survey 2008/2009 is analyzed by the logistic regression model. Based on the results of chi-squared tests and theoretical models which explain female labour force participation, a number of potential variables for inclusion in the logistic regression are identified. The study shows the prevalence of gender differentials in labour force participation which is more profound in urban than rural areas. The study also reveals that female labour in the valley is largely concentrated in subsistence agriculture, retail trade, textiles, crafts with less than one third employed population working as paid employees. In contrary to the general finding about the influence of education on labour force participation, this study has found that women with less than primary education have the highest FLFP followed by labour force participation of women with "No schooling" and completed primary education.

Like most developing countries, Egypt is currently suffering \ from high rate of population growth that exceeds annually 2%. Such a rate impedes its efforts towards socioeconomic progress in many different ways. It increases the proportion of children in the population and raises its age dependency ratio, which means a large part of the resources are devoted to supply of services, food and other basic necessities rather than to investment on developing human resource and generating gainful employment Consequently, the increase in labor supply, accentuates unemployment, underemployment, low production and wage-while the supply for employment is insufficient to absorb the increasing number of-working age population .

Cohabiting unions and marriages have coexisted in Latin America since the times of colonization. Traditionally, the former was most common among population groups characterized by lower socioeconomic status. However, since the 1990s, consensual unions have increased considerably in almost all countries in the region, suggesting its spreading across traditional social barriers. Centered on the idea that cohabiting unions are not a one-dimensional phenomenon; this paper analyzes the extent to which the demographics of cohabiting unions have changed across different cohorts of women in Latin America, while contrasting country-level differentials. Using census data from IPUMS International (1970-2000/2010) we conduct multilevel multinomial logistic regression models. Second, given the relatively recent increase in women’s labor force participation in this region we compare, across countries, the role of income in predicting cohabitation during the mid-2000s. By addressing these two aspects of consensual unions’ continuity and change, our study contributes to the understanding of the role this type of union plays within the larger society and how it may contribute to its stratification.

Brazil is well known for its high and persistent levels of income inequality. Throughout its recent economic history, under different conditions regarding policies and politics, income inequality remained high, and well above Latin American standarts. However, since 1997 inequality has been declining at a rate of 0.8 per cent per year, accelerating the pace after 2001 to 1.07 percent per year, when measured by the Gini coefficient, converging to the region's average.
It is often argued that the main source of Brazilian income inequality is the underlying inequality in the distribution of education. Based on empirical evidence from the National Household Survey, this paper shows how in recent years education has influenced labor income in two ways: first, via increased schooling; from 2001 on, via the reduction of inequality of schooling among workers. As a consequence, the wage gap of workers with differnt levels of schooling was reduced. From 1997 to 2009, reduced labor income inequality accounted for 2/3 of reduced total inequality. The fact that returns to education still remain high by international standarts shows the potential of education to further reduce income inequality, as well as income poverty in Brazil.

The purpose of this paper is to study the current employment pattern of internal migrants and the determinants of migrants’ sectoral employments in urban India, using the recent NSS (2007-08) data. It is found that about 43 per cent of the total urban workers are migrants with 32.2 percent within self-employed, 48.8 per cent within regular-employees and 41.3 per within casual-employed in India. The empirical findings from probit and multinomial logit models suggest that the existing wage rate, possessions of human capital, job market experience and household’s living standard are the major determinants of labour force participation of both seasonal and non-seasonal migrants in urban India. On the basis of above findings, it is suggested that the government of India ought to take strong rural development policy measure to create production networks within rural areas in order to restrict rural out-migration and the consequent urban casual employments, rather than depending too much on the existing Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), which fails to help all sections of rural people.

The population forecast by sex, age, region and educational attainment has never been done in the Czech Republic before the year 2011. Human capital becomes a crucial factor for economic growth in developed countries. Its forecast is a key for understanding possible future development and it can be marked as an input of all economic and social development scenarios. Authors try to forecast the level of the human capital represented by the highest educational attainment what is currently the only way how it can be measured. However, authors are aware that this approach does not exactly correspond with actual knowledge, skills and abilities of individuals.
The multi-state models (Markov chains) were applied for the construction of the forecast. It was made through the transition intensities applied to the current state in the cohort perspective (the transition probabilities between states were determined for every single age in every single year). The educational structure of the Czech population known from the 2001 Census was used as the initial structure.
In accordance to the results of the forecast it could be expected that the share of low-educated people will decrease very significantly in the Czech Republic and the share of people with tertiary education should increase rapidly to 2050.

The return to school is an important part of academic trajectories in more economically advanced societies where it often serves as a strategy for skill enhancement and socioeconomic advancement. Very little is known about this phenomenon in Mexico even though many youth and young adults return to school after beginning their working lives.
The objective of this article is to describe trends in the return to school across three cohorts of Mexican men and women and to identify the factors that are associated with return to school. We use human capital and life course theory to generate hypotheses regarding the determinants of the return to school.
The results show that factors positively associated with the return to school in this population included having secondary schooling or more, being unmarried, having lived in an urban area one year before, having parents in nonmanual or professional occupations, and belonging to younger cohorts. In contrast, age had a negative association with return to school.
Men and women had similar risk to return to their studies, but we find that women belonging to oldest cohort and women without employment experience one year before were less likely to return to school than their male counterparts.

Pakistan is among the countries that are facing a stiff lack of highly-qualified labour force which is impeding its economic development. Since the country has a large number of highly qualified females with excellent academic records in different fields, the importance of labour force participation hence cannot be denied. Despite of the reality that girls and young women’s performance in schools, colleges and universities are undoubtedly admirable and outstanding (for example 70% of the students in medicine and 40% of those in economics are females) and girls and young women enrollment rate in primary schools, colleges and universities are also increasing day by day, labour female market participation continues to be very low. The reasons behind this reality are indecent job conditions, long distance travelling, irregular working hours, family reputation and social disapproval (cultural norms). Home responsibilities after marriage, pregnancy and child care prevent females to join labour market. Parent’s motivations to invest money in the education of their young girls are largely focused on their awareness and a marriage with educated and wealthy male. Under theses conditions the task of the government is to provide proper work environments and create awareness among people about the importance of female professional work.