Why Do Education Vouchers Fail?

How Effective Are Private Schools in Latin America?

My paper will describe and explore the concept of school vouchers as it was proposed by the American thinker and economist Milton Friedman and, then, analyze how this concept is applied in different countries. Furthermore, I will present the underlying philosophical tension between equity and freedom involved in this. The paper will try to provide practical means through which the school voucher system could be used in Romania, especially in the current context of the crisis in the public school system. Conclusions will be drawn concerning the effectiveness of school vouchers on improving both public and private education as well as general social cohesion.

This paper assesses the relative effectiveness and efficiency of private and public schools in Chile, where the military government implemented a national voucher plan in 1980. Non-religious voucher schools (accounting for two-thirds of primary enrollments in all private voucher schools) are marginally less effective than public schools in producing academic achievement in the fourth grade; at best, they are similarly effective. Catholic voucher schools are somewhat more effective than public schools. Nevertheless, non-religious schools are more efficient, by virtue of producing academic achievement at a lower cost. The difference is probably attributable to lower teacher wages and constraints on public school resource allocation. The relative efficiency of public and Catholic schools is similar. We tentatively conclude that the case for shifting public resources to privately run schools is mixed (although a comprehensive evaluation would require evidence not provided by this research).

This paper analyzes the taxation of capital income in Burundi by performing calculations of the marginal effective tax rates (METRs) on a wide variety of alternative investments under the current tax system. The calculations identify the individual and cumulative effects of (i) the business and individual income taxes, (ii) property taxes, (iii) transactions taxes, (iv) customs duties, (v) tax holidays, (vi) preferential business income tax rates, and (vii) the special treatment of partnership income. METRs are also calculated in the presence of income tax evasion. The analysis provides an indication of the extent to which the tax system in Burundi distorts investment allocation decisions across assets (and thus across business sectors) and among alternative methods of finance. It also provides estimates of the overall level of taxation of various forms of capital income, and demonstrates how the effects of the tax system on investment incentives vary with changes in the expected rate of inflation. In addition, the paper briefly describes the advantages and disadvantages of the METR approach; it argues that METR analysis provides a convenient and intuitively appealing way of summarizing the net effects on investment incentives of complicated tax systems, and thus can serve as a useful input in discussions of potential tax reforms.

The purpose of this study is to examine current situations about and factors related to expenditures of private education among pre-school children and to provide policy implications useful for future pre-school children education. The subjects of the study were parents of pre-school children under seven years of age, who lived in Seoul and Incheon area. The survey was conducted using parent questionnaire. The major findings of the study are: First, 86.8% of parents of pre-school children use private education and the average expenditure on it was 154, 446 won. Second, major factors determining their private education expenditure are educational level of parents, parents' job characteristics, household income, and region. Third, the most important reason for using private education among parents is to improve and excel in academic performance of their children. Forth, the higher the parents' expected returns from private education are, the higher the expenditure level of private education is. Fitth, the results of the logistic regressions showed that parents' attitudes toward private education was the most important factor in determining household economic burden associated with private education. The odds were 5 times greater for the parent group with strong desire for private education than for the parent group without it and 1.2 times greater for the parent group with high-expected returns from private education than the parent group without it. In conclusion, systematic, universal educational policies need to be developed to provide and support all the parents with pre-school children, given that their current economic burden is substantial. By providing such support, we can help parents focus on public education. This study examining current situations about and determining factors related to private education expenditures among pre-school children collected data limiting only Seoul and Inchoen area, therefore, future studies need to include data collected nationwide for generalizability of the findings. As well, development of more elaborated survey instruments and analytical methods would advance our understanding in the field.

Social insurance and taxation under sequential majority voting and utilitarian regimes

In recent years, voter turnout has been decreasing in most industrial countries, and about 40% of all electors abstain from voting. This may affect income inequality and the GDP growth rate through a redistribution policy determined by majority voting. In this paper, we explore the reasons for this continuing decrease in voter turnout and assess its social costs. We conclude that informatization lowers voter turnout by generating an information overload, and that a decrease in voter turnout lowers GDP growth by limiting income redistribution.

This paper investigates the effects of tax havens on nonhaven countries’ redistributive policies. We consider that a nonhaven country contains individuals with different labor productivities. A tax is imposed on the income, and the revenues are evenly distributed. The tax rate is determined by majority voting, which reflects the median voter’s preferences. The presence of havens gives rise to the mobility of tax bases, which may increase the nonhaven country’s tax rate in two ways. First, it leads to a median voter with a lower productivity; second, it may enlarge the marginal tax revenue from raising the tax rate. In addition, we find that a stricter antihavens regulation may lower the tax rate. We further show that income shifting is likely to reduce the amount of the transfers. The case of tax evasion is also taken into consideration.

Three basic themes played indispensable roles in Reinhold Niebuhr’s engagements with economic issues: (1) the foundational importance of a theological anthropology for his critical assessment of complex social, economic, and political issues; (2) his focus on two clashing theories of economic order: Adam’s Smith’s doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism and Karl Marx’s revolutionary vision for the collective ownership of property within a centralized state system; and (3) his endorsement of a realistic yet viable alternative to these two classic theories, one that involved pragmatic and incremental steps toward fostering economic justice through the public regulation and oversight of a free-market economy. These pragmatic measures included allocating government resources for vitally important public goods and services at federal, state, and local levels. Though Niebuhr was initially drawn to some form of democratic socialism, he embraced this incremental strategy within the context of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s implementation of his New Deal agenda. My analysis of Niebuhr’s contributions concludes with attention to new challenges confronting contemporary quests for economic justice in a post–New Deal era, one marked Soundings, Vol. 95, No. 4, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania state University, University Park, Pa di sc us sio n diussion

It is primarily the emergence of new state policies promoting market mechanisms in the field of education that has encouraged research on education markets (Maroy, 2006). In the 1980s, conservative American and British governments, drawing on theories of public choice (Chubb & Moe, 1998), encouraged reforms aimed at reducing the alleged inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the bureaucratic management of schools by increasing their autonomy as well as parental choice (Ball, 1993; Bosetti, 2005; Glennerster, 1991; Uchitelle, 1993). Similar reforms have also been implemented in various European countries for over 20 years (Mons, 2007), often in relation with a decennia-long co-existence of public and state-granted schools. These private schools are most often Catholic or protestant schools operating within a national educational system receiving state grants. The countries of the European Union can be divided into three groups according to the relationship private education has with the public authorities (Eurydice, 20001). In Greece and the UK, private schools receive no public funding. However, this absence of funding does not prevent the state from exercising control over private education institutions. In the UK, most denominational and other schools owned by churches or trustees are considered to form part of the public sector education. In the second group of countries (France, Italy, and Portugal), different types of contracts exist which create a link between private schools and public authorities. Depending on the type of contract, the school receives grants of a more or less significant amount and is freer to a greater or lesser extent with regard to conditions (of teaching, teacher recruitment, etc.) imposed by public authorities. Finally, within the last group, which comprises the majority of countries, grant-aided private schools appear to have much in common with public sector schools. In Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, Finland, and Sweden, private education is grant aided, either partially or fully, but operates under more or less the same conditions as public sector education. In The Netherlands, financial equality between public and grant-aided private institutions is a constitutional right. The size of these public and non-public school sectors varies strongly between these European societies for specific historic reasons, and non-public schools disappeared in some of these societies as a consequence of the communist regime. [Article's first paragraph]

America’s public schools have not been exempt from the movement to privatization and contracting out that has characterized government innovations over at least the past quarter century. A number of the issues raised by school voucher programs mirror the management and efficacy questions raised by privatization generally. However, because public education is often said to be “constitutive of the public,” using tax dollars to send the nation’s children to private schools implicates the distinctive role of public education in a democratic society in ways that more traditional contracting arrangements do not. By using a content analysis, the authors explore the extent to which school choice voucher programs are mandated by state statutes to integrate civics education into their curriculum. Findings reveal that across the 14 states (and the District of Columbia) that have enacted school choice voucher programs, statutes exempt these programs from curriculum oversight, including civics requirements, and grant them considerable autonomy in designing their curricula. This study concludes by discussing the implications for ethical and accountable governance when primary and secondary schools fail to cultivate civic competence and civic literacy.

Public versus private education in primary science: The case of Abu Dhabi schools

PurposeSmall businesses file taxes in accordance with the personal income tax code because they are considered flow-through entities. Thus, personal income tax reforms directly affect the incentives small business owners face regarding employment and operations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use the changes in personal income tax rates during the 1993 and 2001-2003 reforms and micro-level data to estimate the effect of statutory tax rate changes on small business employment decisions.FindingsThe authors add two contributions to the current literature: first, the author allow for intertemporal tax planning and second, the author allow the firm’s decision to employ labor to be correlated with the firm’s wage bill decision. Estimation of a Heckman selection model for wage bills shows that the probability that a business will employ labor is 1.18 percent higher when current tax rates increase by one percentage point and 0.70 percent lower when future rates are expected to increase by one percentage point. Among firms that already employ labor, the median wage bill elasticity with respect to current tax rates is −0.64. These estimates are larger than those reported in previous research because my model includes future taxes and allows for correlation between the firm’s employment and wage bill decisions. Omitting the intertemporal tax responses biases the estimates of previous researchers upwards, whereas assuming the two firm decisions are independent biases estimates towards zero.Originality/valueThis paper has been cited in publications published in Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.

Program Design, Incentives, and Response: Evidence from Educational Interventions

This paper develops a two-regional growth model with amenity, capital accumulation and regional public goods with public goods and fiscal policies. The economy consists of two regions and each region consists of the industrial sector and public sector. The industrial sector provides goods in perfectly competitive markets. The public sector, which is financed by the regional government’s tax incomes, supplies regional public goods. The public goods affect both firms and households. We show how to find equilibrium values of the dynamic system and simulate model. Then, we carry out comparative statics analysis with regard to parameter changes in tax rates, congestion and amenity. Our comparative statics analysis provides some important insights. For instance, a main difference between the effects of increasing the two regions’ tax rates on the output is that as the technologically advanced region’s (the other region’s) tax rate on the industrial sector is increased, the national industrial output, national capital employed by the economy, and the national wealth are increased (reduced). In the region which increases the tax rate, the wage rate, consumption and wealth per capita, output per labor force, the population, and land rent are increased, and the corresponding variables in the other region are reduced.