Africa's Education Enigma? The Nigerian Story
42 Pages Posted: 1 Oct 2005
Date Written: October 2007
Abstract
In the last two decades, the social and economic benefits of formal education in Sub-Saharan Africa have been debated. Anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in Africa. Unfortunately, there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level. In this study, I focus on Nigeria a country that holds 1/5 of Africa's population. I use instruments based on the exogenous timing of the implementation and withdrawal of free primary education across regions in this country to consistently estimate the returns to education in the late 1990s. The results show the average returns to education are particularly low in the 90s, in contrast to conventional wisdom for developing countries (2.8% for every extra year of schooling between 1997 and 1999). Surprisingly, I find no significant differences between OLS and IV estimates of returns to education when necessary controls are included in the wage equation. The low returns to education results shed new light on both the changes in demand for education in Nigeria and the increased emigration rates from African countries that characterized the 90s.
Keywords: Nigeria, returns to education, Instrumental Variablehuman capital, instrumental variables, Nigeria, schooling
JEL Classification: J24, J30, I21, I29, O12, O15, O55
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Estimates of the Economic Return to Schooling from a New Sample of Twins
By Orley Ashenfelter and Alan B. Krueger
-
Education for Growth: Why and for Whom?
By Alan B. Krueger and Mikael Lindahl
-
Education for Growth: Why and for Whom?
By Alan B. Krueger and Mikael Lindahl
-
By Esther Duflo
-
By Esther Duflo
-
Income, Schooling, and Ability: Evidence from a New Sample of Identical Twins
-
Using Geographic Variation in College Proximity to Estimate the Return to Schooling
By David Card