Education, skills, and labor market outcomes: evidence from Ghana

In a wide-ranging paper on education, incomes, poverty, and inequality, Teal (2001) estimates the returns to education in Ghana, using four waves of data from 1988 to 1999. Unlike much of the international literature, this study estimates the returns to education not only in wage employment, but also in the two other major occupations - agriculture (which employed 64 percent of the labor force in 1998-99) and self-employment. Pooling the four rounds of Ghana data, the author introduces round dummies to examine how earnings changed over time in each occupation. A major contribution of the paper is that it showcases how the availability of data over time enhances understanding of the poverty-reducing potential of education. Such data permits the decomposition of any increase in incomes due to changes in the average amount of education, as well as to underlying technical progress, over a given time period.

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In a wide-ranging paper on education, incomes, poverty, and inequality, Teal (2001) estimates the returns to education in Ghana, using four waves of data from 1988 to 1999. Unlike much of the international literature, this study estimates the returns to education not only in wage employment, but also in the two other major occupations - agriculture (which employed 64 percent of the labor force in 1998-99) and self-employment. Pooling the four rounds of Ghana data, the author introduces round dummies to examine how earnings changed over time in each occupation. A major contribution of ...  [+] Show more