IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sza/wpaper/wpapers105.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

South Africa’s economics of education: A stocktaking and an agenda for the way forward

Author

Listed:
  • Martin Gustafsson

    (Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch)

  • Thabo Mabogoane

    (Jet Education Services, Johannesburg)

Abstract

The paper reviews some of the existing economics of education literature from the perspective of South Africa’s education policymaking needs. It also puts forward a suggested research agenda for future work. The review is arranged according to five key areas of analysis: rates of return, production functions, teacher incentives, benefit incidence, cross-country comparisons. Whilst benefit incidence analysis is able to demonstrate large improvements in the equity of public financing, cross-county comparisons reveal that not only is quality inequitably distributed, it is overall well below what the country’s level of development would predict. Production functions, especially if translated to cost effectiveness models, can point to important policy solutions. Rates of return are difficult for policymakers to interpret, and need to be viewed in the context of qualifications. Teacher incentives is a policy area that is badly in need of a better theoretical and empirical basis.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin Gustafsson & Thabo Mabogoane, 2010. "South Africa’s economics of education: A stocktaking and an agenda for the way forward," Working Papers 06/2010, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers105
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2010/wp062010/wp-06-2010.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2010
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Timothy Köhler, 2020. "Socioeconomic Status and Class Size in South African Secondary Schools," Working Papers 01/2020, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
    2. Fabrice Murtin & Thomas Laurent & Geoff Barnard & Dean Janse van Rensburg & Vijay Reddy & George Frempong & Lolita Winnaar, 2015. "Policy Determinants of School Outcomes under Model Uncertainty: Evidence from South Africa," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 83(3), pages 317-334, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economics of education; South Africa; education policy; rates of return; production functions; teacher incentives; benefit-incidence analysis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers105. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Melt van Schoor (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/desunza.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.