教育不平等与收入差距关系再检验——基于教育不平等分解的视角

A Re-examination of the Relationship between Inequality in Education Opportunities and Income Gap:Based on the Perspective of Decomposition of Education Inequality

以往文献关于教育不平等与收入差距关系的结论并不一致,原因在于可能忽略了教育不平等中的结构性因素。本文将教育不平等分解为教育机会不平等和教育努力不平等,教育不平等与收入差距的关系应该取决于上述结构因素中效应较大的部分。基于这一假设,本文从微观层面基于环境-努力二分法解构教育不平等,从而测度了教育机会不平等和教育努力不平等,并研究了教育机会不平等与教育努力不平等对收入差距的影响。研究表明,教育机会不平等显著扩大了收入差距,教育努力不平等显著缩小了收入差距;由于教育机会不平等和教育努力不平等的反向作用,总体教育不平等对收入差距的影响不再显著。

The inconsistent relationship between education inequality and income inequality in the past literature is mainly due to the neglect of structural factors of educational inequality.This paper decomposes educational inequality into unequal educational opportunities and unequal educational efforts.The relationship between educational inequality and income disparity should depend on the larger part of the above structural factors.Based on this hypothesis,this paper uses environment-effort dichotomy to deconstructs educational inequality at the micro level,thus to measuring the inequality of educational opportunities and unequal educational efforts.Besides that,the paper studies the impact of educational inequality and unequal educational efforts on income disparity.This paper concludes that the unequal educational opportunities significantly expand the income gap,while the unequal educational effort has significantly narrowed the income gap.The impact of overall education inequality on the income gap is no longer obvious due to the positive and negative effects of educational inequality and unequal educational efforts.