The Economic Returns to Higher Education in the BRIC Countries and Their Implications for Higher Education Expansion
33 Pages Posted: 16 Feb 2012
Date Written: January 17, 2012
Abstract
This paper focuses on the changing economic value of secondary and higher education in four potential world economic powerhouses - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - known as the BRIC countries. We show that in the past twenty-five years in the BRIC countries, changes in rates of return to higher education have not conformed to the diminishing returns to capital theory, which says that rates decline with level of education and that this pattern holds as countries develop economically and educationally. The rates to university completion have generally risen relative to the rates to investment in lower levels of education, and in all but India are now higher than the payoff to secondary schooling. We argue that this reflects the rapid economic change in all four countries, including their incorporation into the global economy, and, in Russia and China, the transformation from command to increasingly market economies.
Keywords: economic returns to higher education, returns to engineering education, BRIC countries, Mincer equation, age-earnings profiles
JEL Classification: J24, J31
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Returns to Human Capital Under the Communist Wage Grid and During the Transition to a Market Economy
By Katherine Terrell, Daniel Munich, ...
-
The Gender Pay Gap in the Transition from Communism: Some Empirical Evidence
By Andrew Newell and Barry Reilly
-
The Gender Wage Gap and Wage Arrears in Russia: Evidence from the RLMS
By Christopher J. Gerry, Carmen A. Li, ...
-
How Estonia's Economic Transition Affected Employment and Wages (1989-95)
By Rivo Noorkôiv, Peter F. Orazem, ...
-
By Peter F. Orazem and Milan Vodopivec
-
By Dean Jolliffe and Nauro F. Campos