Varieties of capitalism and academic achievement. Does the welfare production regime have an impact on 15 years’ old Mathematics results?

Journal of Social Research & Policy, Volume: 10, Issue: 1, pp. 5-16

Date: May 2019

ISSN: 2067-2640 (print), 2068-9861 (electronic)

Abstract: The purpose of the article is to examine the effect of institutional structure of coordinated market economies on the skills and knowledge of youth as hypothesized by Estevez-Abe, Iversen & Soskice (2001) via the PISA 2012 survey. As focal independent variable, a proper country measure of welfare product regime was devised using international available indicators. The theoretical model was tested using multi-level regression of mathematics results of the weighted sample of students from 25 countries that have participated in the PISA 2012 survey. The results show that the expected positive effects on test results of extensive employment and unemployment protection and of larger vocational sector in the upper secondary and of limited participation in the tertiary do not hold. Moreover, several country-level correlations with the averages of test results appear to be statistical artifacts of composition effects. They point to the necessity for further investigations of the interdependencies of social and economic institutions and stratification.

Keywords: Welfare Production Regime; Academic Achievement; Varieties of Capitalism; Skill Profiles.