Economics & Development

This paper synthesizes the growing evidence on the labor market returns to socio-emotional skills and assesses the effectiveness of training programs designed to develop these skills. While existing studies document elevated re-turns to socio-emotional skills in the labor market, there is little consensus on which specific aspects of the skills drive these gains. Using one of the established psychological measures, the Big Five personality traits (the Big Five), the paper defines relevant keywords for socio-emotional skills, conducts web scraping of the literature, and constructs a database of coefficients on returns and training impacts. DerSimonian and Laird random-effects estimates suggest that a one standard deviation increase in each of the Big Five traits is associated with a 1.4 to 3.1 percent increase in real wages, with substantial heterogeneity across individual traits, demographic groups, and country income levels. Among the Big Five, lower agreeableness, often associated with assertiveness and being able to challenge consensus, exhibits the highest wage returns (3.1 percent). Training programs improve the Big Five traits by an average of 0.46 standard deviation, with larger effects for attitude-related traits such as openness (0.67 standard deviation) and conscientiousness (0.40 standard deviation). Although early childhood constitutes a critical period for cognitive skill formation, the evidence presented in this paper indicates that socio-emotional competencies remain markedly malleable in later developmental stages. Well-designed post-secondary interventions can generate substantial gains.

In Simbu, the school inspection system is able to work relatively effectively, as a result of close collaboration between school inspectors, the provincial government and school leaders. Having an effective school inspection system is important, because it is a vital part of education governance and accountability arrangements in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and is being relied on for an increasing range of roles. But it is also challenging, because the inspection function is so underfunded. Not only are there too few inspectors, it is not unusual for them to be posted to provinces without sufficient operational budgets to undertake their functions of going out to inspect schools and teachers. School inspectors are employed by the National Department of Education (NDoE) to work in provinces across PNG. They are not the responsibility of provincial governments, but in recognition of the inspectorate function’s critical importance to education standards and quality, the Simbu Provincial Government dedicates significant resources to enable inspectors to do their work. These collaborative arrangements are not without risks. This case study explores these collaborative arrangements, including both their strengths and challenges, in order to contribute to inter-provincial learning and national policy dialogue on the inspectorate system.