The impact that the systems and practices of the education authorities, as opposed to the management at the school, have on school performance is usually difficult to quantify. Provincial boundary changes occurring in South Africa after 2005 appear to create a quasi-experiment that lends itself...

The emphasis placed in the existing South African school production function literature on better skilled teachers and better school management is discussed. Ordinary least squares and hierarchical linear production function models, using 2000 SACMEQ data, for the country and for a sub-set of...

Analysts such as Hanushek and Woessman have brought to the fore the deceptiveness of education enrolments, or years of schooling, in growth regressions and the need to consider educational quality. In this paper, a nonlinear programming solution is proposed as a way of normalising to a single...

In South Africa, like in many developing countries, the differences between enrolment totals, estimated by the education authorities, and the numbers of children in the country, estimated by demographers in the national statistical agency, defy easy explanations and suggest that one or both sets...

In 2000, Thomas, Wang, and Fan published a paper calling for the application of the Gini coefficient to educational attainment. The idea was to treat educational attainment as a wealth stock, and to calculate Gini coefficients for, say, years of attainment, as a way to see trends within...

In 2000, Thomas, Wang, and Fan published a paper calling for the application of the Gini coefficient to educational attainment. The idea was to treat educational attainment as a wealth stock, and to calculate Gini coefficients for, say, years of attainment, as a way to see trends within...

In 2000, Thomas, Wang, and Fan published a paper calling for the application of the Gini coefficient to educational attainment. The idea was to treat educational attainment as a wealth stock, and to calculate Gini coefficients for, say, years of attainment, as a way to see trends within...

This paper reviews some of the existing economics of education literature from the perspective of South Africa's education policymaking needs. It also puts forward a suggested research agenda for future work. The review is arranged according to five areas of research: rates of return, production...