Do Schooling Years Improve the Earning Capacity of Lower Income Groups?

The paper analyses the relationship between the popular Barro and Lee (2001) ‘Average years of Schooling’ with income inequality, wage inequality, and income deciles and income percentiles for the sample of developed and developing countries. The results suggest that countries where students complete higher numbers of years of schooling on average also perform better on relative incomes meaning that increase in average income comes from improvements in the earning capacity of the lower income groups or unskilled labor. The paper also finds that an educated population means that there is redistribution of income from the rich to the poor creating thriving middle class.