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This article aims to analyze inter‐provincial disparities of rural education and the convergence rate, and to discuss the effects of compulsory education reform after 2001.

The article estimates the rural average education years and education Gini coefficients of China's 31 provinces (municipalities) beside Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan from 2001 to 2008, and applies the method of “economic convergence”.

The results show that after the reform of rural compulsory education, inter‐provincial rural education disparities and educational equality have been significantly improved and trend to convergence; nevertheless the convergence rate on inter‐provincial disparities of education equality declines. The defects of the education input system – “county as principle” – has been a factor that restricts the coordinated development of rural education.

This paper suggests that it is necessary for China's provincial and central government to afford the expense of compulsory education. China's present investment system would also worsen inter‐provincial inequities of education.

Education equality is one of the basic social priorities. In China education equality has been improved; however it could be better if China's provincial and central government afforded the expenses of compulsory education.

This paper applies the method of “economic convergence” to analyze China's rural education disparities among its regions.

This chapter sheds light on long-term trends in the level and structural dynamics of investments in Russian human capital formation from government, corporations, and households. It contributes to the literature discussing theoretical issues and empirical patterns of modernization, human development, as well as the transition from a centralized to a market economy. The empirical evidence is based on extensive utilization of the dataset introduced in Didenko, Földvári, and Van Leeuwen (2013). Our findings provide support for the view expressed in Gerschenkron (1962) that in late industrializers the government tended to substitute for the lack of capital and infrastructure by direct interventions. At least from the late nineteenth century the central government's and local authorities' budgets played the primary role. However, the role of nongovernment sources increased significantly since the mid-1950s, i.e., after the crucial breakthrough to an industrial society had been made. During the transition to a market economy in the 1990s and 2000s the level of government contributions decreased somewhat in education, and more significantly in research and development, but its share in overall financing expanded. In education corporate funds were largely replaced by those from households. In health care, Russia is characterized by an increasing share of out-of-pocket payments of households and slow development of organized forms of nonstate financing. These trends reinforce obstacles to Russia's future transition, as regards institutional change toward a more significant and sound role of the corporate sector in such branches as R&D, health care, and, to a lesser extent, education.

The objectives of this study are threefold: firstly, to measure the impact of educational inequality on income inequality, and per capita income; secondly, to measure the impact of gender inequality in education on income inequality, per capita income and educational inequality; and lastly, to test the Kuznets inverted U-shape hypothesis between inequality in education and average year of schooling.

The study has adopted the Marin and Psacharopoulos (1976) model of human capital in which income earned by an individual can be estimated as a function of number of year spent in schooling or education. Gini coefficient is used as a measure of income inequality, while inequality in education is measured by Gini index of educational inequality. Gender inequality in education is measured by the difference between male and female enrolment ratios as a proportion of male enrolment. The study utilizes the data of six South Asian countries, i.e. Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka from 1980 to 2010 at five-year average and employs fixed effect model (FEM) and random effect model (REM) for estimation.

Result suggests that educational inequality and average year of schooling have positive and significant impact on income inequality. Primary (basic) education and tertiary (higher) education reduce income inequality, while secondary education widens income inequality. Negative relationship exists between educational inequality and per capita income. Unequal distribution of education among boys and girls at primary level increases income inequality, while reduces income inequality at tertiary level. Gender inequality in secondary and tertiary level of education reduces per capita income, while unequal distribution of education among boys and girls further increases the educational inequality. Kuznets inverted U-shape hypothesis does not hold between education expansion and educational inequality, while weak U-shape relationship exists in South Asian countries.

Government has to provide free education in poor regions and makes employment programs to reduce the income and educational inequality respectively, while to remove gender inequality in education it is necessary to build more schools especially for girls. Government has to launch different online education programs for expansion in education at all levels.

This study adds to the literature by analyzing whether the inequality in income increases (decreases) due to increase (decrease) in educational and gender inequality in South Asian countries. This study contributes in the existing literature by developing a measure of educational and gender inequality in education in South Asian countries.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2020-0226.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the determinants of hiring and exit rates by age at the firm level and firm-level age segregation in hirings and separations in Finland.

The use Finnish linked employer-employee data from 1990 to 2004. The authors present a decomposition of employment change by age group to disentangle the roles of hirings and exits from factors related to demographics effects. Firm-level analysis is conducted using regression models for the hiring rates and shares of different age groups and for the probability of hiring older employees. Similar models are estimated for the exits of older employees. Segregation is analysed using age segregation curves and Gini indices calculated from them.

The hirings of older (50+) employees have clearly been more segregated at the firm level than the exits or the stock of old employees. Larger firms are more likely to hire older employees, but their hiring rates are lower. However, the probability of having hires or exits of older workers are much higher in large firms. The results are relatively similar for men and women.

The determinants of the probability of hiring older workers and the rate of hiring them, given that the rate is positive, are different and these two processes should be modelled separately. The Gini index of segregation may be misleading when the number of employees per firm is small. Therefore it is useful to compare segregation to a random reshuffle of employees to firms.

Older worker who have become unemployed or who want to change their job need to have more employment opportunities. Labour and pension policies need to be monitored and designed so that there are more incentives for the individual to search for a new job and for the firms to hire older employees.

The authors provide new empirical evidence of age segregation and hiring prospects of older employees. Age segregation has previously been examined in occupations, but the authors extend the analysis to firm-level segregation. The authors suggest a new decomposition of the rate of employment change to the hiring and exit rates and to a cohort effect.

China’s educational leaders have long debated the pluses and minuses of decentralization of control and resources of China’s vast educational enterprise. During various periods of post‐1949 China, the central authorities have devolved control to the provinces, key cities, and rural communes, only to recentralize later usually due to political reforms. In this chapter various stages of the educational reform movement begun in 1985 will be considered and we will focus on what motivated the reforms in the context of China’s unique political culture. Some specific features of educational decentralization will be examined such as finance, curriculum and management. We conclude that while the current leadership appears to be committed to decentralization, they remain conflicted over the need to maintain control while at the same time respond creatively to the needs of the new market economy.

Previous research has shown that in contemporary societies, women have a healthier dietary intake than men. However, no research has examined how this gender gap develops over the long term. The present study examined how gender differences in fresh vegetable intake frequency have evolved from 1979 to 2017 in Finland and whether differences are affected by age or educational level.

The data were derived from annually repeated, nationally representative “Health Behaviour and Health among the Finnish Adult Population” and “Regional Health and Well-being (RHW)” surveys on the health habits of the Finnish population. The dataset is a time series of repeated cross-sectional surveys. In total, the data sample comprised 161,996 Finns aged 20–64 years. Descriptive methods and logistic regression were used for the analysis.

During 1979–2017, the prevalence of daily vegetable intake increased from 12 to 35% among men and from 18 to 56% among women. Thus, the magnitude of the gap between genders doubled across the study period. The increased vegetable intake was partly explained by the changing education and age structures of society. Potential explanations and avenues for future research are also discussed. Policy implications depend on whether the findings are interpreted as a case of health differences or health inequality.

This study used a long time series to analyse how gender differences in vegetable intake have evolved in a Nordic welfare state context. It showed that the gap in fresh vegetable intake between men and women has widened.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, drawing on a unique data set, the authors estimate the returns to education for Canadian Aboriginal people. Second, the authors explore the relationship between occupation and the economic well-being, measured as income, of Aboriginal people in an effort to provide a better understanding of the causes of income gaps for Aboriginal people.

The data used in this study is the Public Use Microdata File of Aboriginal People’s Survey, 2012. An ordered logit model is used to estimate the key determinants for income groups. Then the marginal effects of each variable, for the probability of being in each category of the outcomes, are derived.

All the explanatory variables, including demographic, educational and occupational variables, appeared statistically significant with predicted signs. These results confirmed relationships between income level and education and occupations.

The data limitation of income, as a categorical variable prevents the precise estimation of the contributions of the dependent variables in dollar amount.

In order to substantially improve the Aboriginal people’s market performance, it is important to emphasise the quality of their education and whether their areas of study could lead them to high-skilled occupations.

Attention is paid to the types of human capital rather than the general term of education.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of human capital on economic growth for a selected sample of nine SSA countries between 1980 and 2014 using a panel econometric approach.

The authors estimate a log-linearized endogenous using the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and the dynamic ordinary least squares (POLS) applied to our panel data time series.

The empirical analysis shows an insignificant effect of human capital on economic growth for our selected sample. These findings remain unchanged even after adding interactive terms to human capital, which are representatives of government spending as well as foreign direct investment. Nevertheless, the authors establish a positive and significant effect of the interactive term between urbanization and human capital on economic growth.

The results emphasize the need for African policymakers to develop urbanized, “smart”, technologically driven cities within the SSA region as a platform toward strengthening the impact of human capital-economic growth relationship.

This study becomes the first in the literature to validate the human capital–urbanization–growth relationship for African countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of farmland renting-in on planted grain acreage.

A survey data of five counties were analyzed with the two-stage ordinary least squares model.

Households renting-in land trended to plant more maize, and the more land was rented by a household the more maize was planted, while wheat acreage showed non-response to farmland renting-in.

Overall, the analysis suggests that policy makers should be prepared for different changing trends of grain crop acreage across the nation as farmland transfer continues. Future research should pay attention to the effect of farmland transfer on agricultural productivity and rural household income growth.

As the Chinese Government is promoting larger-scale and more mechanized farms as a way of protecting grain security, it is important to understand whether farmland renting-in will reduce planted grain acreage. This study provides empirical evidence showing the answer to that question may differ across different regions and depend on the particular grain crop in question.

This paper aims to investigate whether empirical evidence for scale economies can be found across countries and if so, whether this evidence varies across the stage of development.

The paper uses statistical methods to make comparisons between countries.

The empirical results suggest overall evidence towards aggregate increasing returns across all samples. Within the Cobb‐Douglas framework, stronger evidence for aggregate increasing returns is found among samples depicting economies in the early stages of development. The CES framework in turn supports aggregate scale economies for advanced economies, while unitary elasticity of substitution cannot be rejected for less developed economies, giving further support for the Cobb‐Douglas estimates.

Given that evidence for scale economies is found within different estimation frameworks for different groups of economies, comparative judgment is prevented. The results nevertheless provide evidence on the overall relevance of scale economies within and across groups of economies, while also giving a clear indication of the relevance of stage of development in economic growth and development analysis.

The most fundamental insight of the empirical results presented in this paper is that there is no reason to assume that the determinants of growth or the parameters guiding economies' adjustments towards their steady states or growth paths will be similar for economies at different stages of development, given their significant structural differences, whether in terms of production structures and characteristics or consumption patterns.