The School-to-Work Transition in Developing Countries

Youth bulges in developing countries may carry both a potential for growth via demographic dividends, and ticking political time bombs, depending on the success of authorities in providing youth with adequate opportunities as they transit into the labour markets of the twenty-first century. In this article I examine the theoretical and empirical research on school-to-work transitions (SWT) in developing countries. After a discussion of the attempts at operationalising the concept of school-to-work transitions from a statistical point of view, I review the theoretical settings suitable for analysing the SWT. Despite an extensive search and matching literature, few models seem adapted to developing countries’ labour markets, and even fewer are empirically tested. I then examine the determinants of transition lengths at the individual and macro level. Findings indicate that education is not always associated with shorter durations to first employment, and that the reasons may be higher expectations, reservation wages, or queuing. Women generally experience longer transitions in the labour market, and evidence from labour market interventions is mixed. Many factors likely to influence the school-to-work transition have not been studied from the point of view of school-to-work transitions, however, and potential directions for future research are presented.