The Effect of General and Vocational High School Quality on Labor Market Outcomes in Indonesia

To improve the quality and competitiveness of human capital and correspond to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 4 especially target 4.3, to ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, Indonesia has been focusing on improving the quality of secondary education. However, empirical data and previous research showed that secondary school graduates in Indonesia face high unemployment and income differences, especially vocational school graduates. The quality of secondary high schools plays an important role in determining the years of schooling of the graduates and indirectly impacts labor market outcomes. Using longitudinal panel data at the individual level from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) of 2000, 2007, and 2014; and applying education production function and Mincer earning equation, this study finds that the difference in wages between graduates of general and vocational high schools is not statistically significant despite the school quality. However, analyzing within the vocational high schools shows that better quality of vocational high schools increases years of schooling of its graduates as they can access tertiary education, and subsequently increases their performance in the labor market. This finding indicates that policies to improve school quality, especially vocational high schools, should be enhanced.

Vocational Rehabilitation and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from World War I Veterans

This article uses a linked sample of World War I Army veterans from the state of Missouri to study the impact of vocational rehabilitation on labor market outcomes for men wounded and disabled during the war. Veterans’ military service abstracts are linked to the 1940 US Census and a subset are linked to rehabilitation records. This creates a new dataset that contains information on military service, rehabilitation, and labor market outcomes. I find that 70 percent of veterans that were both wounded in action and disabled when discharged from the army participated in the rehabilitation program. These same veterans had significantly better labor market outcomes, which can be attributed to the rehabilitation program under certain assumptions.

Rural Transformation and Labor Market Outcomes among Rural Youths in Nigeria

In Nigeria, unemployment in rural areas translates to economic problems, such as high levels of rural–urban migration. Interventions aimed at promoting rural transformation and development are designed to generate employment by promoting the growth of sectors such as manufacturing and services in rural areas. In this study, the General Household Survey (GHS) panel data for the post-planting and post-harvest periods of the 2011/2012 and 2015/2016 cropping seasons for Nigeria was used to investigate developments in rural areas in Nigeria between 2011 and 2015, and identified how these developments influenced labor market outcomes among rural youths. Fixed effect models were employed to control for unobserved heterogeneity that may exist because of the different years in the data used. Key levers of sustainable social and economic development, such as access to finance, health services, markets, and infrastructure such as electricity, were considered. The empirical results from the study revealed that being educated as well as having access to infrastructure and information had positive effects on the number of youths that took up wage/salary employment in the rural areas. The study concluded that the diversification of youths into other sectors would have higher growth effects on the development of rural areas, as they can invest more in agriculture, while also reducing the level of dependence on the sector. The study recommends an increase in budgetary allocations for education and rural development projects, with a special focus on electricity and financial institutions, while increasing access to information on available job opportunities.