Unemployment, Schooling and Training in Developing Countries

Tanzania, Egypt, the Philippines and Indonesia

M. D. Leonor, M. D. Leonor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429657122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1985. Increasing doubt is being shed on the proposition that higher levels of education in developing countries are an unmitigated good. Unemployment among school leavers and university graduates is now a major problem. Some people argue that what is needed is a reform of primary education and the changing of attitudes to work; but many of the measures adopted have failed to achieve these goals and have only worsened the problem by increasing costs, making curricula less flexible and by increasing 'mis-education'. This book examines the problems and the measures adopted to alleviate them in four important developing countries. It provides many new research findings and much new thinking and concludes with suggestions for improving policies.

1 INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

This study is about unemployment, and about how schools as training institutions react or fail to react to unemployment in Tanzania, Egypt, the Philippines and Indonesia. It is also about the use of policies in education, training and the labour market as means to alleviate the problem in these countries. Lastly, it is about the lessons to be learned from the experience of these countries in trying to cope with unemployment in their educated labour force.

The study investigates mis-education as the major supposed cause of widespread unemployment among school-leavers and university graduates in poor countries. Its focus is on schooling and training rather than on macro-economic variables.

Macro-economic diagnoses suppose that unemployment is a result of inappropriate economic structures and low overall demand that inhibits a full utilisation of available labour. Low demand and unemployment manifestly co-exist and co-vary, thus leaving little doubt as to a direct, and perhaps reciprocal, relation between the two. But the inappropriateness of an economic structure and its complex effect on unemployment are not readily obvious, as shown in detailed analysis by many ILO Employment Strategy Missions. And when this effect varies directly with the educational level of prospective workers, there is good reason to believe in the presence of other, doubtless more profound and specific, causes.

The general situation in the countries chosen for the study was that unemployment tended to be always greater among new workers with more schooling than among those with little or no schooling at all. Rough and ready explanations for this observation do not seem to explain fully certain differences in unemployment rates. One such explanation is that educated workers have higher labour force participation rates and are therefore more liable to be counted as unemployed. Another is that those who never went to school have more time for job-search.¹ The latter explanation might well be partly true but it does not seem to square up to the widely held tenet that education and skills are scarce “commodities” in poor countries and should be employed more than the purely manual contributions of uneducated workers. So it is likely that a good part of the mysteries of unemployment of educated workers lies beyond the reach of economic causes and explanations.

Thus the focus of enquiry was shifted to mis-education, principally to two of its variants, both suggesting that unemployment can be blamed on certain characteristics of school systems. The first of these is that schools fail to develop among school-leavers the flexibility to adjust to changing labour markets, and the second is that schools fail to equip the school-leavers with employable skills for which there is a foreseeable demand.

These variants, however, are not mutually exclusive. But it is useful to keep their identities separate because they stem from different perspectives and they require different remedial approaches. The corrective for the first emphasises mental agility and preparedness to acquire new skills required by new work opportunities; it does not, however, define the location and manner of skill acquisition. The cure for the second is silent on mental preparedness; instead it lays stress on the immediate and direct acquisition of practical skills. Further, it specifies the location of training, i.e. as part of formal curricula in schools.

The four countries studied were predisposed to diagnose the second variant rather than the first, perhaps by reason of history. These countries long had their systems of educating their aristocracy or the ruling upper class. This education was mainly in the “3Rs” and had no skill specific to any occupation. But popular expansion of schools did not strictly follow this model of education. Instead the content of schooling veered towards what was often supposed to be the educational need of the people. In colonies or non-self-governing territories this need was deemed by colonial administrators to be for practical subjects, indeed as it still is today in many technical assistance programmes. This need appeared even more compelling to the four countries when unemployment of educated labour changed from bad to worse. The driving force behind this need was so strong that other solutions to the problem seemed out of the question.

Because none of the countries diagnosed the first variant, it is not possible to illustrate the effects of action taken to solve the alleged failure of schools to develop mental flexibility. But inferences can be drawn from within country differences, i.e. from certain effects of parallel systems of general academic and vocational schools on earnings and unemployment. It is found, for example, that vocational school graduates tend to have lower average earnings and higher unemployment rates than graduates of general academic schools, suggesting certain differences in ability to adjust to labour markets. But many factors influence or intervene in this seemingly straightforward relation, so that categorical statements are difficult to defend. So our arguments were extended from the empirical to the speculative.

The choice of the countries was arbitrary. It was based on what lessons could be learned from the country’s experience that might contribute to a usable body of knowledge.

Tanzania

Tanzania is one of the 25 poorest countries on earth. But it is also a young and innovative one whose strong leadership and dynamic experiments in socialism have been shining examples of how to break away from Africa’s colonial past. When it acceded to Independence, the country was in the limelight of world attention and was receiving aid, not in trickles but in massive quantities, almost to the point of dependency. When aid was reduced substantially, almost every development programme collapsed. However, our interest in the lessons from Tanzania is not in the politics of aid but in what the country did after deciding to ignore the unemployment problem.

Tanzania has effectively prevented the emergence of educated unemployment at the level of university graduates. By socialistic planning she has restricted the expansion of higher education and thus of the supply of graduates. But this has nudged the problem to secondary and primary school-leavers, who are unloaded in their quasi-totality onto a sluggish labour market. In other words, tight control at the university level has pushed unemployment to those with lower qualifications.

This unemployment was considered in certain quarters as being of the voluntary sort because, according to official circles, there was much work to do on the abundantly available land. What was needed was to orient idle school-leavers back to ujamaa villages and to the land. A series of measures such as Education for Self-Reliance (ESR) and National Service was meant to provide this orientation. All this, however, appears to be a futile exercise in an unimproving economy, and school-leavers continued to leave their villages as in the past. Besides, unprecedented innovations in ESR were feared to have deleterious effects on the mental preparedness of pupils and students either for further studies and new work opportunities or for vocational training.

Egypt

Egypt is rich not only in cultural history but also in a newly found resource - oil. In 1981 Egypt was already a middle-income country, with a per capita GNP of about $540, as against a figure of only $260 in 1973. Its 43 million people are predominantly Muslim and Arabic in cultural origin, and seem to have been intricately entwined in Middle East politics since the remote past.

Political change was the context, the origin of policies whose ultimate aim was something much greater than merely alleviating unemployment. Unemployment could have been worse, were it not for Egypt’s proximity to and cultural affinities with other Arab States whose demand for Egyptian skilled labour was large.

Several lessons from Egypt reveal the self-defeating effects of certain policies. Rapid expansion of schools as a gambit for keeping labour force participation rates and unemployment temporarily low had a large and adverse cumulative effect. This was compounded by a guaranteed jobs policy with the prevailing grade system and wage scales which led to overstaffing in government offices and public enterprises. But all these negative effects were a small price to pay for achieving broad social objectives and promoting stability when the country was in the throes of political change.

Measures taken in the school system were likewise self-defeating, because they were in conflict with actual wage scales and opportunities. Social demand was for the traditionally well-rewarded academic schooling rather than for low-paid practical trade training. Yet the authorities established more and more vocational schools and even increased the vocational content of school curricula. Many practical schools were diverted from their original purpose but were “saved” by being transformed into institutions for higher studies; they were thus a roundabout way of preparing for the university. The consequence was a stream of school-leavers who were neither well prepared for university studies nor trained for immediate employment.

The result is regrettably not peculiar to Egypt, being common among ex-colonies whose prevailing concepts about schooling and training can be traced back to colonial times.

The Philippines

The Philippines is an ASEAN² country of about 49 million people with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $822 in 1981. Its economy has been heavily affected by rising fuel prices and a fall in the demand for its products.

The country’s major peculiarity in this study is the presence of a large private sector in high school and higher education which, in conventional theory, should be more flexible and responsive to manpower demand than state-controlled systems. But the leads and lags of supply and demand for specific manpower are rather long, and made longer by a school system whose characteristics are more relevant to a large rich country than to a poor one. Hence, waiting periods for available jobs became unnecessarily long, and unemployment of newly educated labour rather severe; they would have been even worse if it had not been for the fact that opportunities for overseas employment were available.

But the lessons from Philippine experience are not of the speed and ease of response by the state schools to alleged scarcity of skills but rather of the clumsiness and negative effects of such response; not the flexibility of private schools but rather of the need for quality control; not of curricular reforms to make schools more vocationally oriented but rather of the efficient delivery of specific skills through ad hoc training systems.

Indonesia

Indonesia is a big country of 153 million people who are mostly Muslim (about 90 per cent) but who are non-Arabic in ethnic origins. Indonesia is rich in natural resources, chiefly in forestry, agriculture and oil. It is an OPEC country whose income from oil has increased its per capita GNP from $109 in 1972 to $475 in 1980.

Oil has financed Indonesia’s employment-creating development programmes. But the fast expansion of these programmes - perhaps too soon - to the far-flung corners of the archipelago was a heavy liability when there was a glut of oil and oil prices fell in the world market. When the country’s development programmes slowed down, unemployment became worse. School-leavers and graduates outnumbered the supply of modern sector jobs, while university campuses became politically restive with dissatisfaction about the national economy when the fortunes from oil began to slip away.

The Indonesian study reports that unemployment of school-leavers and graduates is a distorted Western view of one of the problems of poor countries. It qualifies this unemployment as a leisurely transition from school to further schooling or to work and later back to school. It appears to be a rational form of behaviour of students who come from the upper strata of Indonesian society and who can afford to hold out for whatever time is necessary to get a relatively decent job. In a country whose culture does not encourage youngsters to cut loose from their families at an early age, the need to find jobs in a great hurry after graduation is perhaps not as compelling as in the West.

This transition was seen as nothing serious in a country where underemployment, unproductivity and poverty loom large. Accordingly, effort in the field of schooling and training has been largely in augmenting the productive capacity of the population, rather than in reducing unemployment as such.

Moreover, the description of this transition, based on results of a tracer study, leads to an understanding of flow problems in which new crops of school-leavers and graduates overload the absorptive capacity of existing employers. Overloading was not a question of over-supply because overall manpower requirements for modernising Indonesia were thought to be very large. Hence, control of flows or of supply even to match actual absorptive capacity of employers was out of the question, provided quality could be sustained. Quality was related to many issues, among which are the design features of the school system, improvement of which could remove certain aspects that prolong waiting time for jobs and entrench occupational immobility.

Some terms

At this point it is perhaps worthwhile to introduce some terms whose meanings varied from one country to another. The term graduates, for example, is specific to university graduates in Tanzania and Egypt, but not so in Indonesia and the Philippines. In the last two countries the term is used rather generally. It, therefore, requires a qualifier for specifying which level is referred to. Thus the terms primary school graduates, high school graduates and college graduates are used in Indonesia and the Philippines, which in Tanzania and Egypt mean primary school-leavers, secondary school-leavers and graduates, respectively. It becomes obvious that the term school-leavers is not synonymous with drop-outs. Strictly speaking, the expression “school-leavers” refers to students who have completed secondary school instruction and passed the so-called secondary school-leaving examination. Unless the level is specified, the term school-leaver applies to those who have completed their studies and passed the corresponding examination for leaving either the lower secondary or the upper secondary school in Egypt or in Tanzania. In some instances, the term is extended to cover the primary school level by using the appropriate limiter as in primary school-leavers already mentioned above.

In this babel of tongues there are also other terms, namely, training, non-formal education and educated unemployment, which readers might also wish to have defined.

The term training has gathered new meanings and has become a source of confusion when undefined for a given context. In this study we distinguish two nuances of the generic term training, namely, the technical and the political. In its technical sense, training is defined by the International Dictionary of Education as “Systematic practice in the performance of a skill”.³ Another authoritative source defines training as “the special kind of teaching and instruction in which goals are clearly determined, are usually readily demonstrated and call for a degree of mastery ...”.⁴ These definitions are general in that they apply “regardless whether [training] takes place within the system of formal education or outside it” (Recommendation No. 150, Paragraph 5(1), and ILO Convention No. 142, Article 2), wherever and whatever is its administrative support.

However, training according to the political nuance is less broad because it is only a part of training in the general technical sense, i.e. it is called training only if it takes place outside school...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Tanzania
• Chapter 3. Egypt
• Chapter 4. The Philippines
• Chapter 5 . Indonesia
• Chapter 6. Summary, Lessons and Issues
• Index