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- One-third of the population of OECD countries hold an upper secondary vocational education and training (VET) qualification as their highest educational attainment, and it is estimated that nearly half will graduate from a VET programme in their lifetime.
- Keeping up with technology developments in industry can be a costly endeavour, although partnering with employers can help to spread the cost of VET programmes.
- While vocational qualifications offer young people a good chance of finding employment, they are sometimes seen as a second-class choice and limit their value in the labour market overall.
- Countries need to ensure their vocational programmes offer all students the basic skills they need in the labour market and in life, as well as the opportunity to progress on to tertiary education if they wish.
The rural education landscape once consisted of one-room schools where a single teacher educated, took care of and supervised students of diverse ages. While multi-grade teaching is still common in many schools, particularly in primary education, increased government spending, better transport networks and higher social expectations have given way, in many instances, to larger schools with several classrooms, teachers and grades, and a greater variety of learning opportunities. Have these changes attenuated the traditional rural-urban gap in academic performance? Are students in rural schools still less likely to go into higher education than students in urban schools? And what makes rural schools different from urban schools more generally?
Budgeting is a work in progress. The process is never quite settled because those who manage it are never fully satisfied. To budget is to decide on the basis of inadequate information, often without secure knowledge of how past appropriations were used or of what was accomplished, or of the results that new allocations may produce. Most people involved in budgeting have experienced the frustration of having their preferences crowded out by the built-in cost of past actions. Budgeting is a deadline-driven process, in which sub-optimal decisions often are the norm because government does not have the option of making no decisions. When one cycle ends, the next begins, usually with little respite and along the same path that was trod the year before. The routines of budgeting dull conflict, but they also are a breeding ground for frustration.
This paper first discusses the theoretical approaches regarding the choice of participating in post-secondary (or “higher”) education, starting with a presentation of the standard neoclassical economics approach, and then adding concepts taken from the emerging behavioural economics literature to take into account “cultural” factors that affect access. The paper then presents the results of an empirical analysis based on a very rich Canadian dataset, the Youth in Transition Survey, which follows youth from ages 15 to 25. It includes remarkably detailed information on family and other background factors, as well as schooling experiences, which provides evidence that points to the importance of cultural influences on PSE choices. Policy implications are then discussed.
The author is grateful to Jyoti Rahman, David Gruen, Lewis Evans, Ben Dolman, Robert Ewing, Graeme Davis, Janine Murphy, Gene Tunny, Dave Turner and Sveinbjörn Blöndal for helpful comments in preparing this paper. The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Treasury or the Australian Government.
This paper explores the relationship between adoption of ultra-fast broadband (UFB) and the export propensity of New Zealand firms. Previous literature have shown that the Internet facilitates exports by reducing search costs and informational frictions in establishing trade relationships. However, the role of faster Internet that enables the use of more recent, advanced, data-intensive digital technologies has not been well explored. This paper shows empirically that adoption of fibre broadband is associated with a higher propensity to enter exporting by New Zealand firms, suggesting that faster Internet has an additional role over traditional Internet in facilitating exporting. The paper also shows that firms that were already using the Internet more intensively prior to adopting fibre experience a stronger increase in export propensity following fibre adoption than those with less intensive Internet use, and that the positive relationship between fibre uptake and exporting is primarily observed among services firms. Instrumental variable analysis to assess the causal relationship between fibre uptake and exporting suggests that the higher export entry among fibre users is driven by self-selection of firms with higher export propensity into fibre uptake.
A student’s performance in school is influenced by personal characteristics, but also, amongst other influences, by those of his or her schoolmates. Schoolmates can motivate and help each other overcome learning difficulties; but they can also disrupt instruction, require disproportionate attention from teachers, and be a source of anxiety. The way students are allocated to schools, and whether that results in greater socio-economic or academic differences across schools, may thus have an impact on education outcomes at the country level.
In which PISA-participating countries and economies are students concentrated in certain schools, depending largely on their ability or socio-economic status? How is socio-economic segregation across schools related to the achievement gaps between students of different socio-economic status?
- Successful education systems are able to guarantee that all students succeed at high levels.
- Across OECD countries, around 60% of the overall, country-level variation in student performance can be traced to differences in how well students who attend the same school can be expected to perform.
- About 40% of the variation in student performance in OECD countries is observed between schools; but among high-performing countries, differences in performance are generally smaller than those in the average OECD country.
School accountability is one of the most controversial recent reforms taking place in education systems around the world, but evidence of whether and which accountability practices affect equity and performance in academic achievement has been difficult to isolate and establish. By using data available from several cycles of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2006-2015), this paper assesses the extent to which accountability practices affect equity and performance in academic achievement in high-income-and-low-and-middle-income-countries. We found no conclusive evidence of accountability practices affecting educational outcomes in high-income-countries. However, we found some evidence in low-and-middle-income-countries pointing towards increased performance and increased inequality under accountability regimes in these contexts, although only in mathematics and science, and for one of our preferred specifications. In low-and-middle-income-countries, we found that, under higher levels of accountability, higher school autonomy on curriculum management and assessment could render better academic results in reading, mathematics and science.
Over the last two decades, reading has shifted from taking place on paper to, increasingly, screens. As digitalisation spreads, there have been growing concerns about unbalanced access to new types of resources between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged students. PISA 2018 results show that while disadvantaged students are catching up in terms of access to digital resources, their access to cultural capital like paper books at home has diminished, and the socio-economic gap has been persistent over the last two decades. This policy brief draws education stakeholders’ attention to this issue and provides evidence for the discussion of equity in education by examining how access to books at home is related to students’ prevalent mode of reading books, their performance in reading and their enjoyment of reading.
Global trade growth over the past few years has appeared extraordinarily weak, even in relation to weak global GDP growth. This paper shows that the apparent breakdown in the relationship between global trade and global GDP growth is largely explained by two factors: an inappropriate measurement of global GDP and extraordinary demand weakness in the euro area. As a measure of demand for traded goods, global GDP at market exchange rates is more appropriate than the conventional purchasing power parity-based measure. Moreover, extraordinary demand weakness in the euro area – which is a particularly trade intensive region – has had a substantial negative effect on intra-euro area trade flows, which are commonly counted towards global trade. When global GDP is measured at market exchange rates and intra-euro area flows are removed from the measure of global trade, econometric estimations suggest that over the past 15 years the long-term elasticity of global trade to GDP has been similar to that of the 1990s. Indeed, the overwhelming part of postcrisis trade weakness can be attributed to weak global demand rather than structural changes, according to the econometric estimations in this paper and supporting evidence on changes in global investment, international production fragmentation and protectionism.
Globally, enrolment in secondary education has expanded dramatically over the past decades. This expansion is also reflected in PISA data, particularly for low- and middle-income countries. Between 2003 and 2015, Indonesia added more than 1.1 million students, Turkey and Brazil more than 400 000 students, and Mexico more than 300 000 students, to the total population of 15-year-olds eligible to participate in PISA.
This welcome expansion in education opportunities makes it more difficult to interpret how mean scores in PISA have changed over time. Indeed, increases in coverage can lead to an underestimation of the real improvements that education systems have achieved. Household surveys often show that children from poor households, ethnic minorities or rural areas face a greater risk of not attending or completing lower secondary education. Typically, as populations that had previously been excluded gain access to higher levels of schooling, a larger proportion of low-performing students will be included in PISA samples.
The need to rapidly decarbonise economies raises questions about whether countries’ workforces possess the requisite skills to achieve the net zero transition as well as the capacity to redeploy workers from “brown” to “green” jobs. This paper applies a task-based framework to granular data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) and country-specific employment sources to generate new indicators of the green skills structure of labour markets for a large number of OECD countries and non-OECD EU countries. Significant cross-country differences emerge in the underlying supply of green skill and the potential of economies to reallocate brown job workers to green jobs within their broad occupation categories. In a majority of detailed brown occupations, workers have in principle the necessary skills to transition to green jobs, with the exception of those in production occupations, who may require more extensive re-skilling. In contrast, workers from most highly automatable occupations are generally not found to have the sufficient skills to transition to green jobs, suggesting more limited scope for the net-zero transition to reinstate labour displaced by automation.