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This paper analyzes the evolution in socio-economic and ethnic disparities in tertiary education attainment, participation, and completion and labor market outcomes in the six countries of Central America. There is evidence of differential progress, with Costa Rica, a middle-income country, and Nicaragua, a low-income country, having improved participation of low-income students in tertiary education, while this continues to be negligible in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Wide differentials in salaries linked to socio-economic background can signal differences in the quality of tertiary education or prior educational experiences. The analysis distinguishes between long-term and short-term constraints and the key transitions in the education cycle that impede access to tertiary education. The main obstacle to accessing tertiary education for poor students is the failure to either start or complete secondary education, suggesting different priorities for different countries in addressing long-term constraints. However, problems also arise within tertiary education, as in all countries the average tertiary education completion rate is below 50 percent, with even lower rates for students from low-income families and indigenous backgrounds. The paper uses an OECD framework for public policies for promoting equity in tertiary education to assess policies in Central American countries and concludes that many of them currently lack the policies, instruments, and institutional mechanisms to promote greater equity in tertiary education. The paper highlights how valuable insights can be obtained from analysis of household survey data in the absence of comprehensive data on tertiary education which is typical of many developing countries.

Access & Equity in Basic Education --- Education --- Education for All --- Gender and Education --- Inequality --- Social Development --- Teaching and Learning --- Tertiary --- Tertiary Education --- Central America

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This paper derives the skill content of 30 countries, ranging from low-income to high-income ones, from the occupational structure of their economies. Five different skills are defined.. Cross-country measures of skill content show that the intensity of national production of manual skills declines with per capita income in a monotonic way, while it increases for non-routine cognitive and interpersonal skills. For some countries, the analysis is able to trace the development of skill intensities of aggregate production over time. The paper finds that although the increasing intensity of non-routine skills is uniform across countries, patterns of skill intensities with respect to different forms of routine skills differ markedly.

ICT Policy and Strategies --- Knowledge for Development --- Labor Markets --- Labor Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Occupational structure --- Occupations --- Patterns of skill intensities --- Rural Development Knowledge & Information Systems --- Skill biased technical change --- Skill intensities --- Tasks --- World Bank

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Attention to the quality of human capital in different countries naturally leads to concerns about how school policies relate to student performance. The data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provide a way of comparing performance in different schooling systems. The results of analyses of educational production functions within a range of developed and developing countries show general problems with the efficiency of resource usage similar to those found previously in the United States. These effects do not appear to be dictated by variations related to income level of the country or level of resources in the schools. Neither do they appear to be determined by school policies that involve compensatory application of resources. The conventional view that school resources are relatively more important in poor countries also fails to be supported.