A roundtable meeting discussed in Minsk on February 15 two studies carried out as part of the collective research project — “Return on Education and Assessment of Human Capital in Belarus” by the IPM and “Tertiary Education in Belarus in a Cross-Country Perspective” by Vladimir Dunaev.
The study “Return on Education and Assessment of Human Capital in Belarus” by IPM Research Center experts Gleb Shymanovich and Alexander Chubryk, defines human capital as “a stock of competencies, skills and personal attributes underlying the ability of a human to produce economic value.” The paper focuses on the assessment of qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the Belarusian system of education and assessment of the influence of workers’ educational attainment on their earned incomes and labor productivity.
The study assumes that the difference in earned incomes of citizens stems from differences in their labor productivity. Furthermore, the study assesses the Belarusian educational system in a comparative perspective and draws conclusions about the imbalances and disproportions that potentially pose a threat to consistent improvements of the quality of education in Belarus.
The objective of Vladimir Dunaev’s research “Tertiary Education in Belarus in a Cross-Country Perspective” is to assess the quality of the Belarusian system of tertiary education in a cross-country perspective on the basis of comparative parameters and indicators and, building on this, assess the quality of human capital reproduced by the national educational system. The study draws the following conclusions: Belarus observes an increase in the share of citizens with higher education; Belarusian education is challenged by the shortage of engineers in the national economy and lack of motivation for young people to choose these professions; there has been a substantiated overall trend towards cutting specialist training programs from five to four years starting the year 2011/2012, which could only be effective if the country were simultaneously promoting full-scale master’s programs, however, Belarus fails to do so; Belarus is obviously short of postgraduate and doctoral programs; during the last decade, state budget support for education has fallen by more than 20%; the Belarusian tertiary education system appears to be unable to discourage students from emigrating.
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BISS (Lithuania) in association with the IPM Research Center and other think tanks and individual experts started working on the project “Human Capital as a Source of Competitiveness and Modernization,” which is deemed of strategic importance to Belarus, back in December 2012. The research area is complex and multi-faceted. We not only assess the return on tertiary education, quality of human capital, and system of education, labor market, organization and competitiveness of Belarusian science and innovation, but also address competitive dimensions of human capital and problem of labor migration.
The roundtable discussion is the first event in the “human capital” series of public presentations that we are planning to have throughout 2013.