Abstract
The recent expansion in tertiary education has not been even across countries and gender, nor has its impact on the composition of the labor force and on labor force participation rates been uniform. In this chapter we compare six predominantly Muslim-populated economies from different regions and historical backgrounds (Egypt, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tunisia, and Turkey) with other non-Muslim countries (Poland, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam). With similar levels of development and public expenditure in tertiary education, an increased population with higher education does not seem to have a substantially different impact on the distribution of the female labor force or unemployment and employment, except in Pakistan. However, concerning the highly educated female population, in terms of labor force participation and unemployment and employment rates, comparisons suggest significant discrepancies across countries.
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Notes
- 1.
Geographic regions from the United Nations Geoscheme system following the M49 coding classification, https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/.
- 2.
World Muslim population by country, PEW Research Center, http://www.pewforum.org/2009/10/07/mapping-the-global-muslim-population23/.
- 3.
The classification is adopted from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (2012). As mentioned in the report, practices and legislations vary within the different groups of Muslim countries.
- 4.
Following the Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map (Inglehart et al. 2014) we chose countries outside the African-Islamic group, as defined by the sixth wave of the World Values Survey, where the selected Muslim countries are situated (except Pakistan and Egypt where data is not available). Poland and the Philippines are part of the Latin American group, and Thailand and Vietnam part of the South Asian group. The groupings have been carried out according to two criteria: “Survival vs self-expression values” and “Traditional vs rational-secular values”. The Latin American and South Asian groups are two of the three neighboring groups to the African-Islamic group, i.e., relatively close in terms of value measures by the WVS. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/images/Culture_Map_2017_conclusive.png.
- 5.
Many countries made changes to their legal framework during the 1990s and early 2000s in order to accommodate the expansion of non-public HEIs (https://www.prophe.org/en/data-laws/national-laws/).
- 6.
- 7.
See Besamusca et al. (2015) for a comprehensive cross-country assessment of the role of these various factors and age effects on FLFP .
- 8.
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Akarçay, A. (2019). Higher Education and Female Labor Market Outcomes in Six Muslim Countries. In: de Albuquerque Moreira, A., Paul, JJ., Bagnall, N. (eds) Intercultural Studies in Higher Education. Intercultural Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15758-6_12
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