The Effects of Free Primary Education on Occupational Choice and Internal Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa

DOI

10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.035How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Regional migration, education, occupation

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between education, occupational choice and regional migration in Sub-Saharan Africa. I assemble micro-data from household surveys and micro-censuses and use a differences-in-differences approach to evaluate the effects of the Free Primary Education reforms on individuals’ education levels, choices of occupation and migration decisions in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. The findings suggest that the reforms caused significant improvements in educational attainment in terms of primary school completion rates and average years of schooling. In all but one country (Ethiopia), the reforms also led a significant proportion of individuals to shift away from agriculture as their main occupation. Significantly positive effects of the reforms on internal migration support the hypothesis that regional mobility may be an important channel for occupational change in these countries. The results also suggest heterogeneity in the effects of the reforms, which are significantly larger for women than men in all countries except for Nigeria.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zhiling Sun
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/14
TI  - The Effects of Free Primary Education on Occupational Choice and Internal Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa
BT  - Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Economic and Business Management (FEBM 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 197
EP  - 211
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.035
DO  - 10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.035
ID  - Sun2020
ER  -