Since the early 1990s, most countries in the MENA region started a new development model that aims to rely mostly on a growing export oriented, and privately held economy to achieve higher rates of growth. This chapter explores some of the equity implications of this transition by examining changes in the distribution of returns to education and gender wage premia in the Egyptian and Moroccan labor market in the 1990s. This is accomplished by estimating joint models of educational choice and wage determination for both countries yielding selectivity corrected returns to different levels of education, from which a crude estimate of the private rate of return is calculated
