The social welfare effect of education expansion: empirical evidence from China

摘要

The human capital literature focuses on private returns to education or the efficiency impact of education. From the perspective of a society or public policy of view, the distributive impact of education is perhaps more important. This study firstly proposes a simple analytical framework which combines both the impacts to analyse the social welfare effect of education. Using Chinese micro data, it is found that education expansion led to higher average wage as well lower inequality, contributing to the improvement in social welfare from 2010 to 2018.

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