Income inequality in Colombia has declined since the early 2000s but remains very high by international standards. Income dispersion largely originates from the labour market, which is characterised by a still high unemployment rate, a pervasive informal sector and a wide wage dispersion...

Structural transformation towards a more knowledge-based economy will strengthen Spain’s medium-term growth prospects. To deal with long standing impediments to higher growth the government has a substantial structural reform programme touching on education, the labour market and the business...

In this paper we assess the determinants of secondary school outcomes in South Africa. We use Bayesian Averaging Model techniques to account for uncertainty in the set of underlying factors that are chosen among a very large pool of explanatory variables in order to minimize the risk of omitted...

This paper proposes and estimates a model of demand for and supply of graduations in tertiary education, which is then used to construct forward-looking scenarios for graduation rates by country. Consistent with evidence that economic returns to education have remained high in spite of rising...

In Slovakia, educational outcomes are below the OECD average and are too dependent on the socioeconomic background of students. Unemployment is high and the school-to-job transition process does not work well. Spending on education and active labour market policies are very low by international...

In this paper we include measures of school quality in regressions determining the labour market premiums to education level. We use the matric exemption score and the pupil/teacher ratio of the respondents’ closest school during childhood as proxies for education quality. We find that the...

Brazil has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty and inequality. This reduction is explained by strong growth but also by effective social policies. Besides growth, public services and cash transfers have played the biggest role, the latter notably through the successful “Bolsa...

Despite sound policies and institutions, Danish productivity has grown modestly over the past decade, both historically and in relation to other countries, contributing to weak economic growth and an erosion in competitiveness. An examination of the four potential drivers of this puzzle, namely...