Views of a Nepali Economist

• Ignorance is Strength by Paul Krugman talks about the state of America's education system.

One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the “high school movement” made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education. And after World War II, public support, including the G.I. Bill and a huge expansion of public universities, helped large numbers of Americans to get college degrees...

But now one of our two major political parties has taken a hard right turn against education, or at least against education that working Americans can afford. Remarkably, this new hostility to education is shared by the social conservative and economic conservative wings of the Republican coalition, now embodied in the persons of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney.

 [...] Adjusted for inflation, state support for higher education has fallen 12 percent over the past five years, even as the number of students has continued to rise; in California, support is down by 20 percent....[...] tuition at public four-year colleges has risen by more than 70 percent over the past decade....[...] cash-strapped educational institutions have been cutting back in areas that are expensive to teach — which also happen to be precisely the areas the economy needs...engineering and computer science. [...]

• Are Western Activists Really Reducing Child Labor?

  [...] There is very little evidence supporting any connection between trade and child time allocation other than through the impact of trade on the living standards of the very poor.

  [...] Garment manufacturers in Bangladesh fired tens of thousands of children in the early 1990s after Senator Tom Harkin proposed banning all imports of industries in which children worked. But Unicef later reported that some had ended up in even worse jobs, as families had to make up for the lost income. A decade later, the International Labor Organization reported that 4.7 million Bangladeshi children under 15 worked, 2.6 million of whom did not get any schooling at all.

•  The poor half billion in South Asia: Is there hope for change?

 The conclusion of the researchers is:

We do not see proportionate reductions in either the headcount ratio or in the depth and severity measures. Poor regions are not catching up with richer regions fast enough, and more needs to be done to accelerate economic and social development in the lagging regions.

# posted by Mukesh Khanal @ 4:32 PM