Working Paper Series: Special Edition of 2016 to 2018 Interns

HI

where ℎ H the estimated attainment ratio of the labour force and H the average years of education received in the respective schooling level j. Those without formal education are assumed to have zero (0) years of schooling. Fully completing primary school takes 7 years, while those who do not complete the cycle are assumed to have an average attended for half that time (3.5 years). Secondary school lasts for 5 years with partial attendance assumed to be 2.5 years. In the case of tertiary education, post-secondary programs are 2 years long, while a first degree at university is typically 3-4 years long. Since post-secondary and university education is amalgamated under the term ‘tertiary’ , following UNESCO (2013) and Psacharopoulos and Arriagada (1986), completion of full tertiary education is taken as 4 years, while partial completion is assumed to be 2 years. These durations are assumed to have remained constant over time when applied to Equation (6). The result is a time series of values for the average years of schoolingfor St Vincent and the Grendines for the period 1970-2014 (see Figure 1). ℎ " is the average years of schooling,

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