É atrativo tornar-se professor do Ensino Médio no Brasil?: Evidências com base em decomposições paramétricas e não paramétricas

Neste artigo avalia-se a atratividade da ocupação de professor do Ensino Médio, tal como expressa por diferenciais salariais entre essa categoria de professores e três grupos de comparação. Os dados provêm da PNAD, anos de 2006 e 2009, e as metodologias empregadas são a tradicional decomposição de Oaxaca-Blinder e uma alternativa não paramétrica proposta por Ñopo (2008), que decompõe em quatro termos o diferencial total, destacando o diferencial dentro de um suporte comum de características observáveis. Os resultados indicam que professores do Ensino Médio possuem diferencial de remuneração favorável, porém decrescente, quando comparados a funcionários públicos e empregados do setor privado. Além disso, e de modo mais preocupante, em comparação a profissionais com qualificação semelhante, a situação é desfavorável aos professores, e mostra deterioração de 2006 para 2009. Resultados obtidos utilizando ambas as metodologias indicam que este último diferencial em grande medida não é atribuível às diferenças nas distribuições de características individuais, mas muito mais à parcela não explicada, o que pode representar baixa valorização social de professores ou diferenciais de produtividade pré-escolha ocupacional ou pós-escolha ocupacional. Qualquer que seja a razão, o déficit de remuneração no mercado de trabalho docente pode ser um dos fatores explicativos do baixo interesse de jovens talentosos pelas licenciaturas com potenciais impactos negativos sobre a qualidade do aprendizado dos futuros alunos

Subjective well-being in China: The role of relative income, gender and location

We use data from two rounds of Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to study the determinants of subjective well-being in China over the period 2005-2010 during which self-reported happiness scores show an increase across all income groups. Ordered probit regression of well-being function reveals large influence of gender, rural residency and household income. Net of control for demographic attributes, health, employment and education status, household assets, the influence of past and future income and province dummies, we find that women, urban resident and people with higher income are happier in China. More schooling and better health are positively and significantly correlated with well-being. Sub-sample analysis reveals that the rich only cares about the relative income whereas the effect of absolute income dominates in case of the poorer section. At the same time, we find significant relative income effect in determining well-being among the poor. The influence of absolute income is larger among female (rural residents) causing a happiness gap vis-à-vis males (urban residents) in the conditional (unconditional) distribution of happiness. Our results suggest that while further growth in private income and reduction in rural poverty will enhance well-being in China, policies that reduce inequality are likely to boost well-being in both rural and urban locations

The relative effectiveness of government and private schools in Pakistan: are girls worse off?

Recent evidence from Pakistan points to significant pro-male bias within households in the allocation of education expenditures. This raises two important questions. Is less spent on enrolled girls than boys through differential school-type choice for the two sexes; for example, through a greater likelihood of sending boys to fee-charging private schools? And, if indeed this is the case, are girls thereby condemned to lower quality schooling, on average, than boys? By asking these questions, this paper makes three contributions to the literature. Firstly, this is one of a very few studies in Pakistan to explore the question of the relative effectiveness of public and private schools despite there being an unpreedeconnted expansion of fee-charging private schools in the past two decades. Secondly, unlike existing papers that focus on primary schooling, this study looks at potential learning gaps by school type for students in their last year of middle school (Grade Eight), very near their transition to secondary schooling. Thirdly, it exploits unique, purposively-collected data from government and private school students, and thus, in estimating achievement production functions, is able to control for a number of variables typically 'unobserved' by researchers. The findings reveal that boys are indeed more likely to be sent to private schools than girls within the household, so that differential school-type choice is an important channel of differential treatment against girls. Private schools are also found to be of better quality - they are more effective than government schools in imparting mathematics and literacy skills. Girls lose out vis-a-vis boys in terms not only of lower within-household educational expenditures, but also in terms of the quality of schooling accessed.privatisation, school choice, gender bias, Pakistan,