Geraint Johnes wins ESRC Brazil-India Pathfinder Award for Economics
Published 8 December 2009
Professor Geraint Johnes has secured £93,000 from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to fund a project entitled ‘Employment and occupational outcomes: the impact of widening access to education in Brazil and India’.
Microdata from the Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (India) and the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicilios (the National Household Survey of Brazil) will be used to throw light on how plans to change access to the educational system will affect the economy in both India and Brazil, and how they will consequently change people's lives in these countries.
Central to the analysis is a statistical model that analyses the determinants of the occupational outcomes achieved by individuals. Once the models have been estimated, based on a number of variables, the impact on occupational outcomes (and hence on economic outcomes and on people's lives) of changing access to education can be evaluated.
This exercise will yield results of significant policy relevance by providing new evidence on the extent to which labour market outcomes are affected by increased access to advanced levels of education - and on how different groups benefit to different extents. Hence it can provide information that is useful to policy makers as they seek to target expenditures in order to have the greatest impact per unit spent. It will also provide information about the suitability of the existing datasets for advanced labour market analysis, leading to recommendations for changes that might in future usefully be made to the data collection instruments.
