Skills

This note was submitted as evidence to the Education Committee Inquiry on School and College Funding.

We summarise the recent evidence produced by the IFS which relates to the post-18 funding review.

In this paper we use high quality data from two developing countries, Ethiopia and Peru, to estimate the production functions of human capital from age 1 to age 15.

Life skills, wealth, health, and wellbeing in later life

We evaluate the long-term impacts of a randomized Colombian training and job placement program.

We estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals with access to many or few books at home at age 10.

The success of universal preschool education depends crucially on the policy parameters and specific country context.

New IFS research finds that providing school breakfasts free to all children in disadvantaged English primary schools helps pupils to make two months’ additional progress over the course of a year. These gains seem to be driven by better behaviour and concentration in the classroom, meaning that even students who don’t eat breakfast at school can benefit from the improved learning environment. These benefits come at a low cost relative to other programmes with a similar impact on attainment.

In low- and middle-income countries (LIMCs), measuring early childhood development (ECD) with standard tests in large scale surveys and evaluations of interventions is difficult and expensive. Multi-dimensional screeners and single-domain tests (‘short tests’) are frequently used as alternatives. However, their validity in these circumstances is unknown. We examined the feasibility, reliability, and concurrent validity of three multi-dimensional screeners (Ages and Stages Questionnaires (ASQ-3), Denver Developmental Screening Test (Denver-II), Battelle Developmental Inventory screener (BDI-2)) and two single-domain tests (MacArthur-Bates Short-Forms (SFI and SFII), WHO Motor Milestones (WHO-Motor)) in 1,311 children 6–42 months in Bogota, Colombia.

We provide evidence on how changes in the use of high-skilled workers (inventors) in a foreign location affect a firm's domestic use of the same type of worker. We exploit rich data that provide variation in the location of inventors within multinational firms across industries and countries to control for confounding firm–time and industry factors. We find that a 10% increase in the use of foreign inventors leads to a 1.9% increase in the use of domestic inventors. Our results suggest that foreign and domestic inventors are complementary in the production of knowledge.

Immigration is often seen as an instrument of adaptation for ageing countries. In this paper, we evaluate, using a dynamic general equilibrium model, the contribution of migration policy in reducing the tax burden associated with the ageing population in France. Four alternative scenarios, compared with a baseline scenario based on official projections, are simulated with the aim of quantifying the effects of immigration on French social protection finances. We show that the age and, to a lesser extent, the skill structure of immigrants are the key features that mainly determine the effects on social protection finances. Overall, these effects are all the more positive in the short to medium term if the migration policy is selective (in favour of more skilled workers). In the long term, the beneficial effects of a selective policy may disappear. But whatever the degree of selectivity of the migration policy, the financial gains from higher consequent migration flows are relatively moderate compared with the demographic changes implied by ageing.