مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد اثرات بازار کار تغییرات فناوری مهارت محور در مالزی ( الزویر )

مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Many countries have experienced sharp increases of enrollment in tertiary education1 in the last decades, with varying economic and social outcomes. The massification of higher education is sometimes a deliberate policy tool, and sometimes the result of a laissez-faire attitude from policy makers facing increased demand for higher education. Should increased educational attainment, especially at the tertiary level, always be encouraged? Will an exogenous increase in the numbers of tertiary educated be followed by increased demand from firms, in some sort of skill-driven structural change? What is the likely impact of increased enrollment on returns to education and on graduate unemployment? In the presence of an increasing supply of educated labor, labor market outcomes of educated workers are conditional on the evolution of their demand. An underlying issue here is that of the substitutability between labor categories with different educational attainment. Several authors argue (Goldin and Katz, 1998; Caselli and Coleman, 2006) that this substitutability is imperfect, some countries being better at taking advantage of their skilled workers than others. Caselli and Coleman (2006) argue that countries more abundant in skilled labor will choose technologies best suited to skilled labor, while countries abundant in unskilled labor will choose technologies best suited to unskilled labor, barriers to technology adoption explaining why some countries are unable to make efficient use of their skilled labor. While it would be a stretch to argue that there is consensus on the issue, skill-biased technological change (SBTC) has often been suggested as one of the drivers behind simultaneously rising wage premia and share of skilled workers in the US (Autor et al., 1998). Empirical evidence has also suggested that this is the case in other developed countries. There is some scarce evidence of skill-biased technological change in developing countries (Berman and Machin, 2000), but not many country-specific studies have been carried out. To our knowledge, no one has attempted to study skill biased technical change in Malaysia. We choose to study Malaysia since its spectacular increase in educational attainment has not been accompanied by falling wage premia of tertiary graduates.

The other major labor market adjustment to rising relative quantities of skilled labor is increased unemployment of skilled workers. High public investment in education has been shown to increase unemployment in some contexts, high-skilled unemployment sometimes even being higher than that of low and medium-skilled.2 The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, which has heavily invested in education over four decades3 serves as a good example of an unsuccessful absorption of young graduates into the labor market (Marouani, 2010; Marouani and Robalino, 2012). However, not only do employment figures matter in their own; it is also important to consider the type of employment facing young graduates. The suggested theoretical links between educational accumulation and growth have sometimes been hard to demonstrate empirically. The arguments put forward range from quality of education to a misallocation problem. Pritchett (1996) argues that one of the reasons education has not been positive for growth is due to inefficient use of graduates, who end up in low productivity sectors such as Stateowned enterprises. This could particularly be the case in those contexts where the State acts as a de facto employer of last resort.

An increase in educational attainment implies two things: first of all, a steadily increasing demand for education. Secondly, that this increased demand has been met by an increased supply, either from the government or from private actors. The question is whether this expansion of supply is a deliberate policy choice, or just an expansion to cover what is called the social demand for education. Blaug (1967) reflects on this in an early paper, arguing that the spontaneous increase of educational supply faced with increasing demand could find its origin in a belief that something akin to Say’s Law operates in the market for professional manpower, i.e. that supply of skilled labor will create its own demand. Thus planners need not fear increasing educational supply in the sense that labor market constraints are unlikely to operate. The topic is however difficult to apprehend: first of all, without a precise picture of the demand for education, it is impossible to know whether supply has been a constraint or not in the evolution of educational attainment. That is, have all those who wished to go into tertiary education been able to do so? If this is the case, have there not been shadow costs associated with the increase, such as increasing rates of exam failure?