Non-linear links between human capital, educational inequality and income inequality, evidence from China

Mo Xu, Shifeng Chen, Jian Chen and Taiming Zhang

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 8, 1-18

Abstract: This study aims to reveal short-run and long-run asymmetries among human capital, educational inequality, and income inequality in China over the period 1975–2020 using a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model. The estimated long-run asymmetry parameters reflect that positive shocks to secondary education (SSE) and higher education (HE) are negatively correlated with income Gini coefficient. The adverse shocks of secondary education (SSE) and higher education (HE) stimulate the Gini coefficient of income, but the effect of secondary education (SSE) on the Gini coefficient of income is not significant, while that of higher education (HE) is significant. The results also highlight that, in the long run, there is a significant asymptotic effect of the education Gini coefficient (educational inequality) and economic growth on the income Gini coefficient (income inequality). However, physical capital stock has a significant adverse effect on income inequality in the long run. Higher education significantly promotes educational inequality, while the square of higher education significantly reduces educational inequality, thus verifying the inverted U-shaped Kuznets curve hypothesis between higher education and educational inequality. Strategically, this study suggests higher education as a powerful tool for mitigating income inequality by emphasizing educational equity.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0288966 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 88966&type=printable (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0288966

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288966

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().