Page 69 - Education for Development:George Psacharopoulos University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
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Education for Development: What Policies?c5





                   failed.

                       Many countries share dismal statistics on youth and unemployment,
                   exceeding 20% in some Mediterranean countries. But is education policy to
                   blame for Greece’s 43% youth unemployment rate or something else, such as

                   the economic crisis the country has been going through for a decade?
                       The earliest attempt to tune the education system to the labor market was
                   the forecasting of manpower requirements. Based again on intuition, there have

                   been efforts to predict what would be the labor market needs in the future so
                   that the school system provide the “required manpower”. In the early 1960’s,
                   many countries assisted by the ILO, the World Bank and the OECD attempted
                   to forecast the number of “qualified” or “high-level manpower”, as it was called

                   at the time, namely the necessary amount of scientists, engineers and the like
                   needed to produce a unit of output in the various sectors of the economy (Parnes,

                   1962; OECD, 1965). In the early 1970s many of the forecasts became mature.
                   An evaluation of the accuracy of manpower forecasts has shown forecasting
                   errors of thousands percent, even for occupations such as teachers (Ahamad and
                   Blaug, 1973).


                   Social inequities


                       One noble goal of the educational system is to improve social mobility
                   and reduce social inequities. Although the supply of education has increased

                   considerably over the years, inequality indices have increased instead of been
                   reduced (Piketty, 2015).

                   Why policies fail?


                       The short answer to this question, is because education policies typically
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