Suchergebnisse

This paper discusses the distributive consequences of trade flows in developing countries (DCs). On the theoretical side, we argue that the interplays between international openness and technology adoption may constitute an important mechanism leading to a possible increase of income differentials in the liberalizing DCs, trough skill enhancing trade. We use a dynamic specification to estimate the impact of trade on within-country income inequality in a sample of 70 DCs over the 1980-1999 period. Our results suggest that total aggregate trade flows are weakly related with income inequality. However, once we disaggregate total trade flows according to their areas of origin/destination, we find that trade with high income countries worsen income distribution in DCs, both through imports and exports. This finding provides a preliminary support to the hypothesis that technological differentials between trading partners are important in shaping the distributive effects of trade openness. Moreover, after testing for the differential impact of trade in middle income DCs vs low income ones, we observe that the previous result only holds for middle income countries (MICs). We interpret this evidence by considering the greater potential for technological upgrading in MICs both in terms of their higher "absorptive capacity" and in terms of their superior ability in serving the differentiated and high-quality markets of the developed world.

The Further Education (FE) sector has been the Cinderella of English education, attracting less research, despite the large number of students who attend FE colleges. We ask whether the post‐16 institution attended by the pupil, i.e. FE college or school‐based provision, influences pupils' final achievement and whether the gain in pupil achievement at A level is greater in FE colleges as compared with school‐based provision. Allowing for the fact that FE colleges admit more disadvantaged pupils, those who attend an FE college do marginally less well at A level. Sixth form colleges have significantly higher value‐added, particularly for higher achieving pupils.

In this paper we analyse the effects of changes in the institutional design of the educational system on school attainment. In particular, we test whether alternative reforms have increased the average educational attainment of the population and whether various deciles of the education distribution have been differentially affected. We constructed a dataset of relevant reforms occurred at the national level over the last century, and match individual information to the most likely set-up faced when individual educational choices were undertaken. Thus our identification strategy relies on temporal and geographical variations in the institutional arrangements, controlling for time/country fixed effects, as well as for confounding factors. We also explore who are the individual most likely affected by the reforms. We also group different reforms in order to ascertain the prevailing attitudes of policy makers, showing that reforms can belong to either inclusive or selective in their nature. Finally we correlate these attitudes to political coalitions prevailing in parliament, finding support to the idea that left wing parties support reforms that are inclusive in nature, while right wing parties prefer selective ones.