Exploring the Impact of Interrupted Education on Earnings: The Educational Cost of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Xin Meng () and Robert George Gregory ()

No 2548, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: During the Chinese Cultural Revolution many schools stopped normal operation for a long time, senior high schools stopped student recruitment for up to 6 years, and universities stopped recruitment for an even longer period. Such large scale school interruptions significantly reduced the opportunity for a large cohort of individuals to obtain university degrees and senior high school qualifications. More than half of this cohort who would normally attain a university degree were unable to do so. We estimate that those who did not obtain a university degree, because of the Cultural Revolution, lost an average of more than 50 percent of potential earnings. Both genders suffered reduced attainment of senior high school certificates and more than 20 per cent prematurely stopped their education process at junior high school level. However, these education responses do not appear to have translated into lower earnings. In addition, at each level of education attainment most of the cohort experienced missed or interrupted schooling. We show, however, that given the education certificate attained, the impact on earnings of these missed years of schooling or lack of normal curricula was small.

Keywords: education; earnings; Cultural Revolution; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-his and nep-hrm
Date: 2007-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (7) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp2548.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2548

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().