Democratization and government education provision in East Asia

Journal of East Asian Studies

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 175-209

  Chen, Jing ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Democratization; East Asia; Education policy; Education spending; Error correction model; Redistribution; School enrollment; Taiwan; Thailand; Time series cross section analysis

Indexed keywords

EID: 56849105424     PISSN: 15982408     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1598240800005294     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy, World Bank Policy Research Report, 1993;
2. Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, Education for Development in Asia (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994);
3. Paul Morris and Anthony Sweeting, Education and Development in East Asia (New York: Garland, 1995).
4. Barry Ames, Political Survival: Politicians and Public Policy in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
5. Steve Chan, "Democracy and Inequality: Tracking Welfare Spending in Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea," in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed., Inequality and Democracy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
6. Robert Kaufman and Alex Segura-Ubiergo, "Globalization, Domestic Politics, and Social Spending in Latin America: A Time-Series Cross-Section Analysis, 1973-97," World Politics 53 (July 2001): 553-587;
7. David Brown and Wendy Hunter, "Democracy and Human Capital Formation: Education Spending in Latin America, 1980-1997," Comparative Political Studies 37 (September 2004): 842-864;
8. George Avelino, David Brown, and Wendy Hunter, "Globalization, Democracy and Social Spending in Latin America, 1980-1999," American Journal of Political Science 49 (July 2005): 625-641.
9. Brown and Hunter, "Democracy and Human Capital Formation";
10. David Stasavage, "Democracy and Education Spending in Africa," American Journal of Political Science 49 (April 2005): 343-358.
11. David Brown, "Reading, Writing, and Regime Type: Democracy's Impact on Primary School Enrollment," Political Research Quarterly 52 (December 1999): 681-707;
12. David Brown, "Democracy and Gender Inequality in Education: A Cross-National Examination," British Journal of Political Science 34 (January 2004): 137-152;
13. Matthew Baum and David Lake, "The Political Economy of Growth: Democracy and Human Capital," American Journal of Political Science 47 (April 2003): 333-347;
14. Joseph Siegle, Michael Weinstein, and Morton Halperin, "Why Democracies Excel," Foreign Affairs (September-October 2004);
15. Nita Rudra and Stephan Haggard, "Globalization, Democracy and Effective Welfare Spending in the Developing World," Comparative Political Studies 38 (November 2005): 1015-1049;
16. Michael Stroup, "Economic Freedom, Democracy and the Quality of Life," World Development 35, no. 1 (2007): 52-66.
17. John R. Lott Jr., "Public Schooling, Indoctrination and Totalitarianism," Journal of Political Economy 107 (December 1999): 127-157, has found a negative effect of democracy on per capita and per student expenditure, whereas Peter Lindert, "Voice and Growth: Was Churchill Right?" Journal of Economic History 63 (June 2003): 315-350, and Rudra and Haggard, "Globalization, Democracy," have found no impact of democracy on education spending.
18. The only statistical study I am aware of is Chan, "Democracy and Inequality," which covers three countries/political entities in East Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. Chan studies the effects of democracy on per capita education spending.
19. David Brown, "Democracy, Authoritarianism and Education Finance in Brazil," Journal of Latin American Studies 34 (February 2002): 115-141.
20. Emily Hannum and Claudia Buchmann, "The Consequences of Global Education Expansion," Occasional Paper, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Project on Universal Basic and Secondary Education, (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2003).
21. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James Morrow, Randolph Siverson, and Alastair Smith, "Political Institutions, Policy Choice and the Survival of Leaders," British Journal of Political Science 32 (October 2002): 559-590.
22. David Lake and Matthew Baum, "The Invisible Hand of Democracy: Political Control and the Provision of Public Services," Comparative Political Studies 34 (August 2001): 587-621.
23. UNESCO, World Education Forum, Dakar, Senegal, April 2000.
24. Michael Wallerstein and Karl O. Moene, "Earnings Inequality and Welfare Spending: A Disaggregated Analysis," World Politics 55, no. 4 (2003): 485-516.
25. Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000);
26. Barbara Geddes, "The Politics of Economic Liberalization," Latin American Research Review 30, no. 2 (1995): 195-214;
27. Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
28. Philip Keefer and Stuti Khemani, "Democracy, Public Expenditures, and the Poor," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 3164 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003).
29. Brown and Hunter, "Democracy and Human Capital Formation."
30. Brown, "Reading, Writing, and Regime Type";
31. Ronald Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
32. Chan, "Democracy and Inequality."
33. Huck-ju Kwon, "Transforming the Developmental Welfare State in East Asia," Development and Change 36, no. 3 (2005): 477-497;
34. Joseph Wong, Healthy Democracies, Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004);
35. Christian Aspalter, Democratization and Welfare State Development in Taiwan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002).
36. Stanley L. Engerman, Elisa V. Mariscal, and Kenneth L Sokoloff, "The Evolution of Schooling Institutions in the Americas, 1800-1925," Working Paper (Los Angeles: University of California, 1998);
37. Peter Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
38. Also see note 4 for other literature on the positive relation between democracy and school enrollment.
39. K. M. Lewin, "Access to Education in Emerging Asia: Trends, Challenges and Policy Options," research monograph for the Asian Development Bank, Emerging Asia Development Review, 1996.
40. Based on the standard Polity score, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Thailand experienced democratic transition in the late 1980s and Indonesia in the late 1990s, whereas Singapore and Malaysia remained authoritarian throughout the study period. In terms of education provision, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are relatively higher education achievers than Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand.
41. Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo, "Globalization, Domestic Politics."
42. A more accurate measure for participation is net school enrollment ratio, which excludes children enrolled at a certain level but above the official school age. However, this measure suffers a serious missing data problem for countries in my sample.
43. Gerardo Munck and Jay Verkuilen, "Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy, Evaluating Alternative Indices," Comparative Political Studies 35 (February 2002): 5-34.
44. Monty Marshall, Keith Jaggers, and Ted Robert Gurr, Polity IV Project, 2003. The project website is www.cidcm.umd.edu/polity.
45. The democratic years in the dataset are Indonesia (1999-2002), South Korea (1988-2002), the Philippines (1987-2002), Thailand (1992-2002), and Taiwan (1992-2002).
46. Geoffrey Garrett, "Globalization and Government Spending Around the World," Studies in Comparative International Development 35, no. 4 (2001): 3-29;
47. Layna Mosley, "Room to Move: International Financial Markets and National Welfare States," International Organization 54 (Autumn 2000): 737-773.
48. Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo, "Globalization, Domestic Politics."
49. Don Adams, "Education and National Development: Priorities, Policies, and Planning," Education in Developing Asia Series, Asian Development Bank, 2002;
50. Alain Mingat, "The Strategy Used by High-performing Asian Economies in Education: Some Lessons for Developing Countries," World Development 26 (April 1998): 695-715;
51. Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, "Effects of Adjustment on Education: A Review of Asian Experience," Prospects 27, no. 1 (1997): 85-107.
52. Dennis Quinn, "The Correlates of Change in International Financial Regulation," American Political Science Review 91 (September 1997): 531-551. For countries included in this study, Quinn provides data for 1973, 1982, 1988, and 1997 only. I extend his coding to annual data.
53. Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo, "Globalization, Domestic Politics";
54. Rudra and Haggard, "Globalization, Democracy";
55. Stasavage, "Democracy and Education Spending."
56. Rudra and Haggard, "Globalization, Democracy";
57. Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo, "Globalization, Domestic Politics."
58. Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo, "Globalization, Domestic Politics."
59. R. Benabou, "Equity and Efficiency in Human Capital Investment: The Local Connection," Review of Economic Studies 63 (1996): 237-264;
60. Daniele Checchi, "Inequality in Incomes and Access to Education: A Cross-Country Analysis (1960-95)," Labor 17 (June 2003): 153-201.
61. Barry Bosworth and Susan M. Collins, "The Empirics of Growth: An Update," Working Paper, Brookings Institution, September 2003. Their measure of capital stock has taken into particular consideration issues such as stock vs. investment and domestic vs. international prices.
62. Joan M. Nelson, Economic Crisis and Policy Choice, the Politics of Adjustment in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990);
63. Chae-Han Kim, "Political Business Cycle in Korea," in Jongryn Mo and Moon Chung-In, eds., Democracy and Korean Economy (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1999).
64. Moritz Kraemer, "Electoral Budget Cycles in Latin America and the Caribbean: Incidence, Causes, and Political Futility," Working Paper Series No. 354, Office of the Chief Economist, Inter-American Development Bank, 1997.
65. The simple Pearson correlation between these two variables is -.9.
66. Rudra and Haggard, "Globalization, Democracy."
67. Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan Katz, "What to Do (and Not to Do) with Time-Series Cross-Section Data," American Political Science Review 89 (September 1995): 634-647;
68. Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan Katz, "Nuisance vs. Substance: Specifying and Estimating Time-Series-Cross-Section Models," Political Analysis 6 (1996): 1-36;
69. Nathaniel Beck, "Time-Series-Cross-Section Data: What Have We Learned in the Past Few Years?" Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 271-293.
70. Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan Katz, "Time-Series-Cross-Section Issues: Dynamics," Working Paper, New York University, 2004;
71. William H. Greene, Econometric Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 2003).
72. Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan Katz, "Throwing Out the Baby with the Bath Water: A Comment on Green, Kim, and Yoon," International Organization 55 (Spring 2001): 487-495;
73. Bernhard Kittel and Hannes Winner, "How Reliable Is Pooled Analysis in Political Economy? The Globalization-Welfare State Nexus Revisited," European Journal of Political Research 44 (March 2005): 269-293.
74. Given the methodological limitations on testing stationarity for TSCS data, both the Im-Pesaran-Shin panel unit root test and Dicky-Fuller tests for individual time series in each country are performed. Details of the tests are not shown here due to space limitations.
75. Nathaniel Beck, "Time Series-Cross Section Data";
76. Anindya Banerjee, ed., Co-integration, Error Correction and Econometric Analysis of Nonstationary Data (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
77. Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo, "Globalization, Domestic Politics."
78. Objections have been made that including country and decade dummies might absorb cross-section and cross-time variance; thus, scholars need to be careful about using them by balancing their advantages and disadvantages. Thomas Plumper, Vera E. Troeger, and Philip Manow, "Panel Data Analysis in Comparative Politics: Linking Method to Theory," European Journal of Political Research 44 (March 2005): 327-354;
79. Beck and Katz, "Time Series-Cross Section Issues." In response to these concerns, an F-test has been conducted in the study to assess whether country effects are required; some countries have also been added or dropped from the model one at a time to see whether the results would differ. In terms of using the decade dummy of the 1990s, given that my data (eight countries, thirty-three years each) are dominant in the time dimension, I am less worried that one decade dummy would badly absorb the variation.
80. Since I do not theoretically expect a long-run impact of election cycle on education spending, I have only included a differencing term for it.
81. John Fox, Applied Regression Analysis, Linear Models, and Related Methods (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997).
82. For a detailed derivation of the error correction model and the interpretation of the coefficients, see Appendix 2.
83. For formulas to interpret the coefficients, see Appendix 2.
84. Data for disaggregated spending are available only for the period 1971-1997, while data for aggregate spending covers 1971 to 2003. What compounds less data availability for disaggregated spending models is the problem of missing data in countries such as Indonesia.
85. The four measures are (1) another dichotomous measure of democracy that highlights its contestation and participation nature (Mike Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, and Adam Przeworski, "Classifying Political Regimes," Studies in Comparative International Development 31 [Summer 1996]: 3-36);
86. a continuous measure of the Polity score, (3) the liberty score published by Freedom House focusing on a list of political and civil rights that citizens should enjoy in a democracy (Raymond Duncan Gastil, "The Comparative Survey of Freedom: Experiences and Suggestions," Studies in Comparative International Development 25 [Spring 1990]: 25-50);
87. and (4) a democracy score (polyarchy) constructed by Tatu Vanhanen, "A New Dataset for Measuring Democracy, 1810-1998," Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 2 (2000): 251-265, relying mainly on election results.
88. The positive impacts of democracy on secondary school enrollment are no longer significant when I use indicators that do not emphasize the institutional constraint dimension of democracy (Freedom House liberty score and Vanhanen's polyarchy index; see note 51).
89. For example, the explanatory variables already in the model (except capital stock as percent of GDP) can explain 35 percent of total government spending.
90. Two studies have identified different effects of democracy on education achievement for rich and poor countries: Brown, "Reading, Writing, and Regime Type";
91. and Baum and Lake, "Political Economy of Growth."
92. Urbanization is included in the school enrollment models due to its high explanatory power.
93. Taiwan does not have data on capital account openness; Hong Kong lacks data on capital stock, polity score, and election.
94. I was able to include Taiwan in the estimation sample by dropping the explanatory variable of capital account openness; similarly, by dropping capital account openness, capital stock, election, and the changing of democracy specification from polity scores to Freedom House liberty scores, I was able to include both Taiwan and Hong Kong in the estimation sample.
95. Another advantage of case study is to help identify the underlying causal process, which is beyond the scope of this article.
96. Among other democratizing cases in the sample, South Korea, which democratized in the late 1980s and has a relatively high income, is well represented by Taiwan. The Philippines, with lower income and democratization in the late 1980s, is well represented by Thailand. Indonesia, which democratized in the late 1990s, is a less ideal candidate to study the effects of democratization, which may take some time to realize.
97. Three kinds of proelite spending inequalities have been identified by the Taiwanese education movement organizations: (1) the government devoted more resources to university education than to compulsory education; (2) investment in academic education was favored by the government over vocational education; (3) private education received few subsidies from the government compared with public education. Given the strict government control of enrollment in public universities and senior high academic schools, it is students coming from rich families that are more likely to go to the better-funded academic schools, public schools, and universities, as they can better afford extra exam tutoring and fees and have less need to make money. Xiaohua Xue, Civil Education Reform Movement in Taiwan (in Chinese) (Taipei: Qianwei Publishing, 1996).
98. Xue, Civil Education Reform Movement in Taiwan.
99. Jing Chen, "Globalization, Democratization and Government Education Provision in East Asia" (PhD diss., Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, 2007).
100. Article 164 of the Taiwanese constitution stipulated that "expenditures of educational programs, scientific studies and cultural service shall be, in respect of the central government, no less than 15 percent of the total national budget; in respect of each province, no less than 25 percent of the total provincial budget; and in respect of each municipality or hsien, no less than 35 percent of the total municipal or hsien budget."
101. Some authors argue that this is because the central government devoted most resources to defense spending. Jingyi Zhu and Jiahui Ye, "Private Education in Taiwan: Examination of Current Status and Policy Recommendations" (in Chinese), paper presented at the National Civil Education Reform Conference, January 8, 1994.
102. Due to the limitation of my research, I have no information on the names of these legislators or the bills they proposed.
103. Article 164 was abolished upon recommendation by officials in the executive branch, such as the Ministry of Finance and the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting, and Statistics, and the Executive Yuan, for reasons of inefficiency and waste. Lizhu Chen, "The Crisis and Turning Point of Education Finance in Taiwan" (in Chinese), proceedings of the Taiwan Education Fundamental Act Conference, 2000);
104. Shixin Huang and Zhiquan Ding, "A Study on Education Revenues and Expenditures: Reasons for Freezing Article 164 of the Constitution and Responses" (in Chinese), Taiwan: Ministry of Education, June 1999.
105. Another reason for the decreasing ratio is the smaller youth population at the primary and the secondary levels.
106. Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thailand: Economy and Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
107. Clark Neher, "Democratization in Thailand," Asian Affairs 21 (Winter 1995): 195-209.
108. Waranya Teokul, "Social Development in Thailand," ASEAN Economic Bulletin 16, no. 3 (1999): 360-372.
109. Silaporn Nakornthap, Educational Policy and Politics in Thailand: A Case Study of Education Reform, 1973-77 (Tallahassee: Florida State University, 1986).
110. In the mid-1980s, of the students who passed the university entrance exams, 46 percent were Bangkok residents and 74 percent were children of proprietors or government officials. Furthermore, the subsidies provided by the government for the tertiary level far outweigh those provided for the primary and secondary levels. Erik M. Kuhonta, "The Political Economy of Equitable Development in Thailand," American Asian Review 21 (Winter 2003): 69-108.
111. David Murray, "The 1995 National Elections in Thailand: A Step Backward for Democracy?" Asian Survey 36 (April 1996): 361-375;
112. World Bank, Thailand: Secondary Education for Employment, vol. 1: A Policy Note (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001).