Africa's Education Enigma? The Nigerian story

Ruth Uwaifo

No 21254, 2006 Annual meeting, July 23-26, Long Beach, CA from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: In the last two decades, the social and economic benefits of formal education in sub-Saharan Africa has been debated. Anecdotal evidence points to low and time varying returns to education in Africa. Unfortunately, there has been little econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level. Here I focus on Nigeria, a country that holds 1/5 of Africa's population, and use instruments based on the exogenous timing of the implementation and withdrawal of free primary education across regions in this country to precisely estimate the returns to education in the late 1990s. In addition, claims of time differences in returns are investigated. The results show that the average returns to education are particularly low in the 90s, in contrast to conventional wisdom for developing countries (3.6 % for every extra year of schooling in 1998). In addition, there have been significant changes in returns to education for head of households over short time periods. These results shed new light on both the changes in demand for education in Nigeria and the increased emigration rates from African countries that characterized the 90s.

Keywords: Labor; and; Human; Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/21254/files/sp06uw01.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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea06:21254

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.21254

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Annual meeting, July 23-26, Long Beach, CA from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().