The School-to-Work Transition in Developing Countries

Abstract

Youth bulges in developing countries may carry both a potential for growth via demographic dividends, and ticking political time bombs, depending on the success of authorities in providing youth with adequate opportunities as they transit into the labour markets of the twenty-first century. In this article I examine the theoretical and empirical research on school-to-work transitions (SWT) in developing countries. After a discussion of the attempts at operationalising the concept of school-to-work transitions from a statistical point of view, I review the theoretical settings suitable for analysing the SWT. Despite an extensive search and matching literature, few models seem adapted to developing countries’ labour markets, and even fewer are empirically tested. I then examine the determinants of transition lengths at the individual and macro level. Findings indicate that education is not always associated with shorter durations to first employment, and that the reasons may be higher expectations, reservation wages, or queuing. Women generally experience longer transitions in the labour market, and evidence from labour market interventions is mixed. Many factors likely to influence the school-to-work transition have not been studied from the point of view of school-to-work transitions, however, and potential directions for future research are presented.

Acknowledgements

I extend my thanks to Claire Zanuso, to the editors, and to several anonymous referees sho provided me with insightful comments. Any remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This review takes the form of an extended review revolving around the concept of school-to-work transitions. Although a meta-analysis on duration studies would be interesting, the variety of model specifications and definitions for the SWT used in the literature, together with an overall relatively small number of published studies, renders this exercise unfruitful.

2. The countries included are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States.

3. The school-to-work transition in the United States more typically refers to learning experiences at an employer’s work site (Ryan, 2001). This is not the definition adopted in this text.

4. The ILO’s Work4Youth consider the transition to start upon graduation or from the individual’s first economic activity.

5. A further important assumption is that working in the informal sector disallows for job search in the formal sector.

6. This can also be achieved in a repeated search-model.

7. Relying on the ILO concept of transited individuals, meaning those who are in stable employment, or satisfactory temporary or self-employment.

8. This also implies that focusing only on unemployment in these contexts is insufficient at best, and misleading at worst.

9. See for example: Matsumoto and Elder (2010), Mel, Elder, and Vansteenkiste (2013), Elder, Novkovska, and Krsteva (2013), Elder (2014), Mussa (2013), Toufique (2014), Barsoum, Ramadan, and Mostafa (2014), Barcucci and Mryyan (2014), Serriere (2014), and Libanova, Cymbal, Lisogor, Marchenko, and Iarosh (2014).

10. Comprised of six equally weighted dimensions: father’s occupational status, father’s and mother’s educational attainment, number of books in the home, number of rooms per person in the home, and a checklist of other possessions.

11. Related to, among other things, scrutiny from international institutions.