Education and income determination in Kenya /

Bigsten presents much new data on the Kenyan skilled and unskilled, formal and informal, and urban and rural labor markets. He shows that returns to education in Kenya are high for secondary school, for males, and in urban areas, but not for primary school, for females, and in rural areas. Yet evidence permits him only to conjecture that educational expansion reduces income inequality in Kenya. Paul Collier and Deepak Lal's paper for the World Bank, Poverty and Growth in Kenya (1980), is more comprehensive on Kenya's inequality. Kabiru Kinyanjui's EdD thesis, ``The Political Economy of Educational Inequality: A Study of the Roots of Educational Inequality in Colonial and Post-Colonial Kenya'' (Harvard, 1979) does better in combining political and economic analysis. Jan Vandemoortele's Income Distribution and Poverty in Kenya: A Statistical Analysis (Nairobi, 1982) is more rigorous in measuring inequality. But since these three works are unlikely to be accessible in libraries not specializing in Africa, Bigsten may be the best available source. Good bibliography. University-level collections.-E.W. Nafziger, Kansas State University