Understanding poverty and inequality in Mozambique : the role of education and labour market status

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis deals with poverty and inequality in Mozambique and with the link of education to wellbeingthrough the labour market. Earlier studies that analysed well-being in Mozambique drewcounter-intuitive conclusions about the spatial distribution of poverty and inequality. They focusedexcessively on money-metric indicators of well-being and adjusted the poverty line so as to make itreflect taste and price differentials across regions. This thesis suggests the use of a wealth indexbased on asset holdings and derived by employing Multiple Correspondence Analysis to support themoney-metric results. If results are not also confirmed by other indicators of well-being, one shouldbe sceptical of simply unquestioningly applying best practice approaches. In this thesis the moneymetricresults drawn by earlier studies are not confirmed by this other indicator of well-being.Since education is a policy lever that can be used to influence the existing patterns of poverty andinequality, one needs to understand how it operates through the labour market in improving wellbeing.Developing and poor economies such as Mozambique are characterised by a very segmentedlabour market and by a small wage sector. A large proportion of the working-age population isengaged in subsistence agriculture and self-employment activities. Using a multinomial logit modelthis thesis demonstrates that schooling has an influence on the choice of employment segment. Forinstance, schooling increases an individual's chances of getting a public sector job, but lowers his orher chances of falling into self-employment activities. This study also links schooling to earnings. Itargues that when analysing the relationship between schooling and earnings in a poor developingeconomy one should account for the multiple segmentation of the labour market as well as forsample selection bias. To estimate the effects of schooling on earnings this thesis thus employs amodified version of Dubin and McFadden's model. It finds a positive association betweeneducation and earnings in the public wage sector, the private wage sector and in the selfemploymentsegment. Convex returns to education are also found, and accounting for selectivitybias does improve the earnings functions relative to those based on ordinary least squaresregressions.Education quality has a bearing on an individual's performance in the labour market and thereforeaffects the role of education in alleviating poverty. Thus, this thesis identifies the correlates ofeducation quality in Mozambique. Employing education production functions based on ordinaryleast squares multivariate regressions it finds that most of the correlates of educational achievementsuggested by the literature are indeed associated with educational outputs. Employing Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition techniques often used in labour studies to study earnings discrimination, thethesis attempts to explain the reasons behind the average deterioration in education quality inMozambique. The initial hypothesis on this matter was that the average deterioration in educationquality over time was associated with the increase in the proportion of pupils from low socioeconomicbackgrounds. This hypothesis, however, is not confirmed. Likely explanations include thedecline in the efficiency of the education system and more lenient pupil promotion policies.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University