Egalitarian and elitist education systems as the basis for international differences in wage inequality

Klaus Wälde ()

Public Economics from EconWPA

Abstract: This paper investigates one reason why some countries have experienced a strong increase in wage inequality over the last decades while others have not. The explanation is based on the link between the quality of education and induced technological change. A country with qualitatively better-educated skilled workers, relative to unskilled workers, has a higher ratio of human capital to labour than a country where the quality of education is more equal across education levels. These differences lead to different paths of induced technological change across countries, which in turn imply different histories of the distribution of labour income.

Keywords: wage inequality; Quality of education; Elitist and egalitarian education systems; Biased technological change; Distribution of labour income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 D33 H52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-pbe
Date: 2002-03-21
Note: Type of Document - Tex; prepared on IBM PC; pages: 24 ; figures: included
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://129.3.20.41/eps/pe/papers/0203/0203004.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Egalitarian and elitist education systems as the basis for international differences in wage inequality (2000)
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:wpa:wuwppe:0203004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Public Economics from EconWPA
Series data maintained by EconWPA ().