Essays on the Economics of Education in Indonesia
Daniel Charles Julius Suryadarma, December 2010
The Australian National University
Abstract
This thesis consists of four essays that examine different aspects of education in Indonesia and relate all the findings to policy implications. The first essay investigates the effect of four different interventions aimed at improving the effectiveness of school committees, a community representative body, on student outcomes in Indonesia. In the second essay, I measure and investigate the reasons for the gap in secondary education progression between Muslims and non-Muslims in Indonesia. The third essay examines the relationship between the type of senior high school attended by Indonesian youth and their subsequent labour market outcomes. In the fourth essay, I use a new measure of corruption from a survey conducted by Transparency International Indonesia to investigate whether corruption can explain the apparent lack of relationship between the amount of public spending on education and education outcomes at the district level in Indonesia.
