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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.

With many countries having reached universal primary and secondary education, parents are increasingly investing in private tutoring as a means of ensuring that their children attend the best schools and universities. However, unlike the returns to years of schooling and effects of school quality on student achievement, the effects of spending on private tutoring have received limited attention. This chapter studies the impact of tutoring on higher educational outcomes using exogenous variation in tutoring expenditure caused by the imposition of a curfew on the operating hours of tutoring institutes in Korea. The estimated effects of the curfew highlight the severity of the college entrance rat race, with a 10 p.m. curfew constraining tutoring expenditure and increasing sleeping hours. I find diminishing marginal effects of tutoring on college entrance and positive effects on degree completion while the impact on college major followed varies across disciplines.

The purpose of this chapter is to critically review the Korean Official Development Assistance (ODA) policy in terms of its context, actors, structures, and values so as to find how these characteristics are reflected in the education ODA of Korea. Previous studies, documents of Korean Government, and ODA-related statistics are reviewed. Self-confident in being transformed from a poor recipient country to a DAC donor, Korean government emphasizes the so-called Korean ODA Model in sharing its economic development knowledge and experiences with the developing countries. Despite the coordination effort by Prime Minister’s Office, government ministries tend to pursue its own ODA policies, while the finance ministry and the ministry of foreign affairs play major roles. As a result Korean ODA is economy-oriented, fragmented, and uncoordinated in planning and implementation. This study has found that such characteristics of Korean ODA are also reflected in the education ODA. For instance, TVET and higher education are the priority, while basic education is neglected, and the education ministry has its own ODA policies and programs. Outside studies on Korean ODA policy is rather scarce, furthermore, critical reviews other than policy advocacy are hard to find, particularly in English. This study will be a good start for further ones to understand the Korean ODA policy including education.

This chapter discusses the major steps and issues related to the inclusion of public services in inequality research. Empirically, it investigates how the income distribution in countries changes when the value of publicly provided services to households is included. The authors consider five major categories of public services: education, health care, social housing, childcare and elderly care. On average across OECD countries, spending on these ‘in-kind’ benefits accounts for about 13% of GDP, slightly more than the spending on cash transfers – but with considerable cross-country variation. Broadening the income concept to account for in-kind benefits considerably increases households’ economic resources. But public services also contribute to reducing income inequality, by between one-fifth and one-third depending on the inequality measure. This chapter suggests that publicly provided services fulfil an important direct redistributive role in OECD countries.

It is our pleasure as editors to dedicate Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 20 to Professor Jacques Silber. Jacques is a long-time friend of the series and has kindly functioned as a mentor and advisor to us.

Knowledge capital formation through investment in education has been at the center of the recent economic planning and management. Increase in labor productivity and technological innovation is the outcome of Research and Development (R&D) which is a part of the higher education system of a country. Therefore, to achieve long-run sustainable growth, an economy should dynamize its higher education framework along with strengthening the primary and secondary education to reflect the changing realities. The study examines the interplay between the percentage of educational expenditure in total expenditure and per capita net state domestic product (NSDP) of eight selected metro city states of India during the period 2005–2006 to 2015–2016. The result shows strong positive impact of educational expenditure on per capita NSDP. Therefore, the study suggests to increase the percentage share of educational expenditure in total expenditure.

This paper studies the cross-country differences in conventional measures of inequality of opportunity in Europe in the space of individual disposable incomes. Exploiting two recent waves of the EUSILC database reporting information on family background (2005 and 2011), we provide estimates of inequality of opportunity in about 30 European countries for two sufficiently distant data points, allowing a check of consistency for country rankings. In addition, we exploit two observations available for most of the countries to explore the relationship between many institutional dimensions and inequality of opportunity, finding evidence of negative correlation with educational expenditure (especially at the pre-primary level) and passive labour market policies.

During the past few decades, South Korea has experienced a remarkable educational expansion at its secondary and tertiary levels as well as at the primary level, resulting in extraordinary variation between the educational attainment of recent and older cohorts. Using 1990 data from the Social Inequality Study in Korea, the study examines trends in the influence of social background on educational attainment across three male cohorts born between 1921 and 1970. Although in general the impacts of social origin have changed little at the secondary levels of education, there is a significant reduction in the effect of father’s occupation on the odds of completing middle school for the youngest cohort. From a multinomial model of transitions to each type of tertiary education, it is found that family background has a stronger effect in the transition from high school to four-year university than to junior college. Interestingly, there has been an increase across cohorts in the influence of father’s education on the likelihood of entering a university, while such a pattern is not observed for the transition to junior college.

We assessed the differential effects of social expenditures on males and females by establishing the impact of public expenditures on education and health on gender parity in primary and secondary enrollment and on gender parity in life expectancy for Nigeria given age dependency ratio, annual population growth rate, and GDP per capita growth rate. We found that increased social spending on health and education increased female education enrollment which was hitherto lower than male enrollment. Again, increased social expenditure on health and education improved male life expectancy which was hitherto lower than female life expectancy. We established the importance of increased social expenditure on health and education; gender budgeting and gender-sensitive budgets; and implementation of inclusive growth policies in engendering gender parity in Nigeria.