Exploring the World Banks Educational Development Strategy.

The limitations of the Human Capital Theory and the windows for new policy formation under the Capabilities Approach
Lecturers: Dr. Xavier Bonal, Dr Mieke Lopes Cardozo, Dr Inti Soeterik Globalization, Education and International Development

ThanosTsikonis: 10328637

Table of Contents

Introduction

Human Capital Theory

Human Capital Theory and the World Bank

Implications of the Human Capital Theory in Educational Development

Poverty, Education and the Capabilities Approach

Conclusions

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Literature

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Introduction The scope of this paper is to highlight that the limited perspective with which the Human Capital Theory and the World Bank address education and poverty has led to the creation of educational policies that cannot effectively tackle the problem of property. From the 1990s and afterwards, the World Bank has integrated education in its strategy for tackling poverty. However, this integration has been performed under the influence of the Human Capital Theory and has not managed to address the problem to date. In the first sections of the paper, we will analyze the Human Capital Theory and we will demonstrate how the World Bank, which is the main sponsor of development in the countries of the South, uses these theoretical constructions to form the framework of the current educational policies for addressing poverty. We will analyze how these policies and the impacts they will have on the total feedback of this effort are evaluated. In the second part of this paper, we will demonstrate how the re-evaluation of these theoretical constructions by using the Capabilities Approach can lead to a more comprehensive picture of the relation between poverty and education. This more comprehensive picture could expand the existing political framework and inspire policies that would address the deeper causes of poverty, so that the educational policies for its tackling have better results. Human Capital Theory From the 1960s and afterwards, the theoretical construction that has affected the contemporary thinking on education the most is the Human Capital theory, as developed by Gary Becker, in its work Human Capital. A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (1964). In this work, Becker expresses the opinion that "individuals decide on their education, training, medical and other additions to knowledge and health by weighing the benefits and costs. Benefits include cultural and other non-monetary gains along with improvement in earnings and occupations, while costs depend mainly on the foregone value of time spent on these investments (Becker, 1992). This theory develops the notions of the individual and the investment he makes in his education. Viewing education as an investment brings into the analysis the notions of cost and return. Therefore, the individual invests in education, when he expects that it will enjoy from it more than it will cost him. The cost calculated by the individual includes his direct expenses for participating in the education, as well as the opportunity cost he incurs due to such participation. The benefit of the individual includes the payoff he is expected to have from his work, due to his advanced education. The main view of the individual according this theory is the one used by most neoclassical economists. The individual is a rational being that can make long assessments of cost and benefit and by his freedom of will decides whether he will be educated or not and to what extent. In accordance with the Human Capital theory, the investment in education is expected to upgrade the quality of the capital each one of us has and will, this way, produce higher salaries for the individual and higher productivity for the economy. The increase in productivity will lead to the much wanted economic growth. Therefore, the correlation between
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investing in education and the growth of an economy is rendered clear (Schultz, 1961, Becker, 1964, Romer 1990). According to Livingstone, in the Human Capital theory, human capabilities can be compared against the other natural sources of capital used in production. When these sources are effectively used, the results are profitable both for the enterprise and for the entire society (Livingstone, 1997). Thus, human capabilities become a part of the production conditions in the same way as the natural capital. Investing in human capital will, therefore, lead to its positive change through time by contributing to the increase in the total production and the maintenance of a positive growth rate. Introducing education in the production conditions of an economy creates the need to invest in teaching those capabilities and skills that will be auxiliary to the capital and the enterprises, so that they produce more, resulting in the end also in the satisfaction of the natural capital holders through profitability, of the labour force holders through salaries and of the total economy through the productivity increase and the final growth of the end product. It is, therefore, obvious that the investments in education either by individuals or by the central authority has a sense when it enhances the capabilities and skills that are related to production. Under these circumstances, it is rational that the individuals invest in the education that will bring to them higher rates of return. They will make their choice according to the information they have available. If, for example, students regard that the acquisition of a postgraduate diploma will bring them in the future more money than it will cost them, then it is more probable that they will choose to invest in their education, exactly due to the return they expect to have. The labour market serves, through salaries, as a signal for the individual who, taking into account all cost and benefit factors, will decide in the end whether it will participate in the education or not and to what extent. Respectively, at a macroeconomic level, the central authority in an economy will decide where and how much it will invest, also according to the results that these investments are expected to have in the preservation and increase of its total productivity. We have chosen to briefly present the Human Capital theory due to its influence on the educational policy implemented in the last decades, especially, within the pale of the World Bank. Afterwards, we will analyze the problematic points of that theory and the impacts they have on the educational policy for development. However, before that, we will analyze the general framework of the educational policy of the World Bank and its correlation to the Human Capital Theory. Human Capital Theory and World Bank Since the 1990s, the education has played a definitive role in the global agenda on development. National governments, non-governmental organizations and international institutional organizations have highlighted the role of education in addressing poverty and, inductively, in the economic growth of countries (Tarabini, 2010). The elaboration of the new agenda on development, in which education has a primary role, has been significantly affected by the World Bank. The World Bank is the main sponsor of educational development and, moreover, is the only organization having the size, the qualifications and the power to coordinate
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international initiatives in this field (Mundy, 2002). Therefore, the World Bank has undertaken to form the framework within which the policies on educational development are formed. Following the severe criticism to the organization for the implementation of the Structural Adjustment Programs and the general discontent with the ineffectiveness of the Washington Consensus in tackling global poverty, the World Bank has formed a new educational development agenda (Tarabini, 2010). The report issued by the World Bank in 1990 discussed for the first time the existence of other strategies as well for the development of additions to the market forces. Throughout the 1990s and until 2010, the so-called Post Washington Consensus Agenda on development, which acknowledged the errors of the past and brought new data in the fight against poverty, had already been formed (Tarabini, 2010). The World Bank Report 2000-1 presented three pillars for tackling poverty: promoting opportunity, facilitating empowerment and enhancing security. This new strategy and all the reports of the World Bank since the 1990s include, in the priorities for development, the fight against poverty using education as a means for achieving it. According to Aina Tarabini From the perspective of the WB and based on the human capital rationale, providing basic education for poor people is understood as a crucial element for stimulating their empowerment and activation and consequently, for increasing their capacity to create income and their chances of breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Therefore, education becomes the vehicle by which individuals will be mobilized to participate in the production activity and to contribute to the economic growth of the entire economy through their productivity. The influence of the Human Capital theory on the World Bank is also apparent in the World Bank Group Educational Strategy 2020. In that report, the Bank clearly reveals the relation between education and economic growth and takes a step further. This report states that, according to Hanushek and Woessmann, research assessing the link between the quantity of education (in terms of enrollment or average years of schooling) and economic growth has been encouraging but somewhat mixed, perhaps because ultimately what matters for growth is not the years that students spend in school, but what they learn. By measuring education levels based on what students have learned, one influential study estimates that an increase of one standard deviation in student scores on international assessments of literacy and mathematics is associated with a 2 percent increase in annual GDP per capita growth. In the aforementioned abstract, the World Bank overcomes the problems arising from the empirical studies that have not resulted in a clear relation of the education with economic growth by introducing a new priority in the educational policy, that of quality. According to that new variable, the most important for economic growth does not seem to be the time an individual spends in school but the quality of those he learns. The quantification of educational quality is performed through international assessment tests such as that of PISA. Therefore, according to the World Bank, what now matters for economic growth does not seem to be the average schooling years but the scores the countries will achieve in these tests. Implications of the Human Capital Theory in Educational Development Many problems arise from the Human Capital theory for education. These problems are identified at two levels, the theoretical and the political one.

The basic theoretical assumption of the Human Capital theory is that individuals can rationally decide whether they will invest in their education or not. Such a decision will be taken using individual criteria relating to the return of their investment for their life. The main problem of this assumption is that it places individuals in a spaceless and timeless context. The Human Capital theory does not examine the factors that affect the individual when taking a decision on whether to participate in the education and cannot quantify them so that they are included in the opportunity cost. These factors are related to the historical course of each individual and society with social or political structures that prevail in the spatial framework in which the individual engages and to his cultural capital, as its notion has been developed by Bourdieu. According to Bourdieu, the academic success or failure is not the result of the physical skills of the individual, as suggested in the Human Capital theories, but is also affected by the hereditary cultural capital of the individuals. This capital includes the knowledge, the skills and, in general, the advantages that the individual has inherited from his family so that he succeeds in the current educational system. In this sense, the cultural capital becomes an obstacle for individuals coming from lower social classes and, this way, contributes to the preservation of the existing status quo. The second problem in the Human Capital theory is that it determines and reduces education to one more factor in the production function. Education is regarded as one of the means by which a country can produce more goods. Viewing education as capital and connecting it to the produced goods through productivity and the production function restrict the role and the value of education, by highlighting only a part of it. According to Unterhalter, education has an intrinsic value. This means that education is also good for men and women because education is good in itself. All other things being equal, an educated person, who can access a range of different ways of thinking about issues and participate fully in the life of a society, has a more fulfilling life, than an uneducated person, who is barred from this, even though the educated person may not benefit financially. (Unterhalter 2003, 9). On the contrary, the Human Capital theory does not attribute an intrinsic value to education but education acquires a secondary value due to the benefits it brings to the individual or the society. A society/ state or an individual must not invest in education anyway, as implied by the acceptance of the intrinsic value of education, but on conditions. These conditions are mainly the salary, for the individual, and the productivity of the total economy, for the society/ state. This secondary value of education may be divided into the instrumental value and the positional value of education. According to Unterhalter and Brighouse, the instrumental value of education that is very often acknowledged as schooling helps the individual acquire, to a certain level, the capacity to work and participate in the social and political life. The education has also, at a third level, positional value. It is the value a person acquires due to his education as compared to the others in terms of success (Unterhalter; Brighhouse, 2003, 19). In this dimension of the education, the individual will use the grades collected, the degrees acquired or the reputation of the schools and universities he attended to stand out from the others. We regard that the Human Capital theory approaches education mainly from the aspect of its positional value. The positional value of education is the one that can be translated more easily into monetary terms and it is the one that will gain higher weight in the calculations made by the individual for taking a decision on whether and how he will be educated. Respectively, the society/ state will be able to assess more easily whether it must invest in education or not, by assessing more easily its benefits through the use of parameters that can be quantified, such as productivity. The practical application of the Human Capital theory favours the promotion of the positional value of education and underestimates the other two
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dimensions or, in case of intrinsic value even ignores it. Such underestimation, in theory, of the intrinsic value of education leads, in practice, to policies that do not promote education as an individual or social right but as the means for achieving other objectives. Even though in the most recent global initiatives for educational development, such as Education For All, education is presented as a right and there are expressions about the intrinsic value it has, these expressions remain mainly in the theoretical sphere (Unterhalter; Brighthouse, 2003, 9). As we have already stated, the Human Capital theory has impacts at two levels, the theoretical and the political one. At the theoretical level, attention is paid to the spaceless and timeless character of that theory, as well as the deficient presentation of the education it provides. Following, we will try to further analyze how the theoretical gaps in the Human Capital theory create respectively political action gaps in the educational policy for development. The spaceless and timeless character of that theory favours the elaboration of policies that can support the possibility of global application. Within this context, these policies match the current globalised society and are promoted more easily by the global actors. However, omitting space and time in the application of policies on education, especially when it is used for tackling poverty, such as in the case of the World Bank, fails to take into account the underlying reasons accelerating poverty potential and leading to its vicious cycle. To give an example, we will refer to the Millennium Development Goals and, in particular, to the second goal that is related to education. This goal attempts to achieve universal primary education. This goal is in theory pursued within the context of the intrinsic and instrumental value of education. On one part, it gives global character to primary education, acknowledging it as a human right and, on the other part, the very emphasis put on primary education gives priority to the instrumental value of education due to the correlation of primary education to schooling and the acquisition of the basic social and individual skills that are necessary for the participation of an individual in the society and the political life, as already mentioned. The main component used for evaluating this goal is the net enrolment ratio in primary education. Net enrolment ratio in primary education means the number of children of official primary school age who are enrolled in primary education as a percentage of the total children of the official school age population. The second component is the rate of students starting from the 1st grade and finishing primary education. In case of Madagascar for example, the rate of children enrolled in the primary education is 99.3% but only one half of these children will attend all grades of primary education. With regard to the Millennium Development Goals and by making international comparisons, Madagascar has succeeded. However, it is a fact that half of the children do not complete their primary education and this is one of the main reasons for intergenerational poverty. What is missing from the picture so that we can respond to the major problem of poverty is why these children will not finish primary education. By identifying the reasons for which these children do not enjoy the freedom, according to Amartya Sen, of education, policies could be drafted to address the main causes of poverty that could result in better long-term results in education as well. We think that exactly these gaps can be filled by the capabilities approach to educational development, which will be analyzed in a subsequent paragraph. Continuing with the political gaps entailed by the Human Capital theory, the policies formed in the context of correlating education with economic growth orient its role towards the creation of those capabilities and skills that could be used by the labour market and will lead, subsequently, to an increase in the productivity for the total economy. According to the report of the World Bank on educational development policy 2020, one of the problems that must be
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addressed is the fact that young people finish school and enter the labour market without the capabilities and the skills that are necessary for them to adapt to a constantly more competitive and globalized society. Therefore, emphasis, on a global level, for the educational development policy is specifically put on the development of specific skills that are formed by the needs for competition and globalization. There are two basic problems with this proposal. The first problem is related to the introduction of the notion of competition in the educational policy, while the second is which these capabilities and skills that an individual must have in a globalized society are. The introduction of the notion of competition also affects students in their educational centres, whether these are schools or universities. The need for competition is a result of the positional value of education mentioned above. Promoting in a more intense way the picture of positional value of education, the Human Capital theory inspires policies that enhance competition both between students and between educational centres. These policies promote new forms of organising education, such as the system of vouchers and private schools. The rationale is |that vouchers and charter schools would induce private education providers to compete for public school students giving consumers educational opportunities not previously available and simultaneously forcing poorly performing public schools to improve or lose their students (Carnoy; Mc Ewan, 1999, 2). According to Carnoy and McEwan, the results of studies carried out in particular in the context of Chile, where the first experimental effort to put these theories in full practice was made, have showed that market competition in education neither improves academic performance nor manages to provide a higher-quality education for lower income classes that need it the most. Moreover, by assessing the educational policy on vouchers and the large extent of privatizations that took place in Chile in the 1970s, the same authors conclude that vouchers and charter schools do not only provide increased choice for consumers. Many privately run schools also have a choice of students and with regard to private schools Private schools are more likely to locate in areas with more educated parents, who have more income and whose children are, on average, easier to bring to high levels of achievement... Private schools may also be more likely to locate in areas where public schools have lower than expected student performance (Carnoy; Mc Ewan, 1999,2). What do these remarks of Carnoy and McEwan mean for the results of privatizations and vouchers for the poorest social classes? The answer is further social exclusion. Lower income classes not only do not enjoy a higher-quality policy but also, in addition to the problem, the distance between these social classes and the higher ones increases. The choices made by good schools about who students to accept and where to establish leads to the social exclusion of students that do not have the cultural capital as per Bourdieu, as analyzed at the beginning of this paper. In addition to the issues of competition and privatizations, another issue arises relating to the priority given by the World Bank to learning skills and capabilities in light of the globalization. The question is which these capabilities and skills are. As already mentioned in a previous section, the World Bank has linked, in its latest report, the notion of quality to education and economic growth. The notion of quality stands for the capabilities and skills that the children must have acquired when they finish their primary education. These capabilities and skills are assessed through international assessment tests such as that of PISA. PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) is an initiative of the OECD member states and is mainly aimed at assessing the children of the member countries in three cognitive fields, reading, science and mathematics. According to Svein Sjberg, in his article PISA and "Real Life Challenges": Mission Impossible?, The concerns of PISA are not about 'Bildung' or liberal
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education, not about solidarity with the poor, not about sustainable development etc. - but about skills and competencies that can promote the economic goals of the OECD. These capabilities and skills promoted by the wealthy countries of the world and by the World Bank, which form the framework for the application, afterwards, of the national policies on education create a society equipped with the "technical" skills so that individuals can participate in the labour market but undermine numerous other skills that develop to the individual the feeling of community and solidarity. At the same time, by putting emphasis on reading, mathematics and science, issues pertaining to social and humanitarian disciplines are neglected. The marginalisation, in a sense, of these disciplines is intensified by the increasingly strong correlation of the labour market to the secondary and tertiary education, which emits signals to students to choose disciplines that will provide them with technical skills and knowledge, skills that will lead to higher salaries and easier employment. The Human Capital Theory and the policy of the World Bank on education have reduced education to a means not to an end in itself. The danger in this case lays in that policies inspired within this context address the very individuals in the same way. The individual is also transformed into a "means" for attaining an economistic goal, such as the higher production growth rate. Emanating from the economic discipline, the Human Capital theory insists on perceiving man as homo economicus not as homo politicus. In this light, education is also considered an investment not a "right". Following, we will try to present how the capabilities approach can cast light on points that have remained dark to date and bring more significant results in tackling poverty through educational development. Poverty Education and Capabilities Approach Before answering to this question on which are these new data brought by the capabilities approach to education and how they better address the issue of poverty, we would like to further analyze the relation between education and poverty. According to Xanier Bonal in his article On global absences: Reflections on the failings in the education and poverty relationship in Latin America the results of the educational policies implemented in the area in the last decades as regards combating poverty have not been encouraging to date. School enrolment rates have significantly risen and so have the average schooling years of the student, but poverty rates have generally remained stable and/or increased. Bonal, in his article, puts emphasis on the relation between poverty and education, by assessing not only the results education has on poverty but also the results of poverty on education. As stressed out in the same article, different political views have been expressed regarding the provision of the basic conditions required in order to be able to take advantage of individual abilities. It is beyond doubt that the factor that has been most instrumental in causing a review of these conditions is the persistence of a poverty problem that it is not merely the result of a failure to take advantage of the opportunities offered but, in most cases, a reflection of the fact that it is actually impossible to take advantage of these opportunities (Bonal 2007, 88). Therefore, poverty is a factor that strongly affects the effectiveness of education through the exclusion of individuals, primarily, from having access to education or, secondarily, from being able to participate therein on an equal basis. The term equal basis refers to the different conditions individuals are confronted with, which play a significant role in their performance in the school environment. For example, a child from a poor family that is undernourished participates under the same terms in the school environment with the other
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children or, even, a child that works and participates in the survival struggle of his family has the same options to succeed with his other schoolmates that do not need to spend their time in the same way. It is clear that there are specific conditions or, to use the term adopted by Sen, "unfreedoms" that poor families are confronted with, which lead to an unequal educational "experience". Apart from the direct educational experience that differs between individuals due to poverty, there are also differences in the perception the individuals develop of what they can do with the education they have. There is a significant difference in the expectations for employment that an individual who has grown up in a slum of a big city of the "developing" world has as compared to the expectations of individuals living outside the slum (Auyero, 2002). The capabilities approach to education, inspired by the work of Sen and Nussbaum, attempts to cast light on, and to give an answer to, the aforementioned questions by taking into account the aspects of poverty and education that are not included in the Human Capital theory. According to Sen capabilities are the substantive freedoms that s/he enjoys to lead the kind of life s/he has reason to value (Sen 1999, 89). According to Martha Nussbaum, growth is a bad indicator of life quality because it fails to tell us how deprived people are doing; if we ask what people are actually able to do and to be, we come much closer to understanding the barriers societies have erected against full justice (Nussbaum 2003, 33-59). Therefore, the notions of equity and social justice are introduced into the development buzzwords. The first element that diversifies the capabilities approach is that it views individuals as an "end" and not as a "means". In this light, education has an intrinsic value for human development. The second element is that it examines the capacities of individuals as regards their access to education and during their education. These two different starting points on how we regard individuals and education lead to two different ways of evaluating education. This means that, if policies are inspired by that theory, they will not be evaluated on the basis of test results, such as PISA, and they will not end in the plain counting of the persons enrolled in education. Specifically, this theory would result in a need to locally assess educational policies, leaving international comparisons to a secondary level. In this aspect, attention is given to the time students spend in education and to the reasons obstructing them from participating and from learning. This more comprehensive approach enables the development of supplementary policies adapted to the needs and problems of local society that would aim at reducing the intensity of unfreedoms faced by the poorest social classes so that they are able not only to participate in education but also to enjoy the same "experience" as the other social classes. Therefore, the swift to the capabilities approach leads to the quest for the range of actual education experiences that are available to individuals. In this sense, the capabilities approach raises questions relating more to equity and less to individual usefulness (Unterhalter; Vaughan; Walker, 2007). Respectively, the policies inspired by this approach would address equity issues that, according to the Human Capital theory, are not included in the analysis. According to Sen, the capabilities each individual has relating to education must be equated but the educational results, such as the income or the usefulness or even rights, must not. Nussbaum generates a list of 10 central human capabilities as the core entitlements for human flourishing and living life with dignity (Unterhalter 2005, 115,117). Nussbaum views these capabilities as a guide for social justice that could have, to a certain extent, global application. It is understood that policies inspired by this approach, aiming at social justice and
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equity, lead to combating inequalities arising in its society or even at global level. These inequalities are identified in the means available to the individuals and how they can use them. The educational policies that are inspired by this approach are not aimed plainly at the existence or expansion of opportunities but at the equality of opportunities between the individuals in the society. This means that the notions of competition between schools and educational institutes, privatizations, educational vouchers and anything entailed by the promotion of positional value of education would lose ground. Policies based on the capabilities approach, aiming at the equality of opportunities and promoting the intrinsic" value of education, would move in a totally different framework. Fukuda-Parr, attempting to analyze the human development paradigm promoted in the work of Sen, as compared to the neoliberal paradigm or the paradigm of basic needs, underlines that the economic growth is only a means and not an end in itself. Furthermore, the concern with the wellbeing of all people emphasizes equity as a major policy objective, requiring monitoring not only through national averages, but also through measures of deprivation and distribution (Fukuda-Parr 2003 , 305). I argue that policies based on the capabilities approach must turn their attention to two fronts: The first is the very educational system and the second is local society. In order to be able to attribute an intrinsic value to education and equal access for all members of the society, we must consider education as a "public" good. As such, education will be provided to all citizens in exchange for no tuition fees. The cost of producing such a good, given that it has an intrinsic value for development, can be allocated among the members of the society. Moreover, the cost must be allocated according to the capacity of each member of the society to offer. This would help for reasons of social justice and, at the same time, would smooth inequalities, since it would comprise elements of redistribution. Public education ensures equal access to all citizens. Nevertheless, this does not mean that all those who have access enjoy the same experience. The functioning of a public university for training professors, as well as a public authority competent to establish and evaluate the curriculum, would help in this sector. Ensuring equal access and similar experience in education is a first institutional step for a society. These conditions create an environment that helps all individuals in a society to participate in education within a framework of social justice. The second policy axis that is based on the capabilities approach must focus on the specific unfreedoms experienced by individuals in a society, which do not allow them to take advantage of the opportunity to be educated to the same degree as the other members of the society. Local administration mechanisms that can highlight problems and provide effective social welfare systems must exist in order to identify and effectively address these unfreedoms. Therefore, if we think of educational policies that will address poverty according to the capabilities approach, we can have better results exactly due to the holistic view of poverty and education that this approach offers. Conclusions In this paper, we have tried to analyze how educational policy for development has been promoted to date, using as a theoretical basis the Human Capital theory. This theory produces theoretical gaps as regards the notion of education and, more significantly, has political implications that do not help effectively resolve the problem of poverty due to their limited aspect. Considering education an "investment" and interlinking it to economic "growth" restrict the wider dimension that the value of education has, resulting in the formation of policies that are
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aimed at developing those skills and capabilities that will help the individual to adapt to the globalized economy. Moreover, the Human Capital theory has paved the way for the privatization of economy and the provision of more "opportunities" to individuals through "vouchers" and charter schools. The influence of this theory within the pale of the World Bank, which is the largest and major sponsor of educational development policy worldwide, has resulted in the promotion of these policies at global level with a view to better combat poverty, without, though, bringing the expected results. In this paper, we have argued that for education to have results on poverty, the results of poverty on education must first be taken into account. The capabilities approach provides the theoretical framework within which this can take place. It acknowledges the intrinsic value of education and, at the same time, moves focus away from the one-way pursuit of economic growth. It acknowledges that individuals face unfreedoms that may prevent them from enjoying the same experience in education and suggests that equity and social justice are prerequisites for human development. The capabilities approach could inspire policies that would be more effective in tackling poverty, exactly because it acknowledges dimensions of poverty and education that are neglected in the Human Capital theory.The capabilities approach as proposed by the works of Sen and Nussbaum is still an open debate. There can be many ways through which an incorporation of this theory into policy formation can be invisioned. The World Bank has tried to incorporate this approach in its new agenda but the problem lies in what aspects of the theory are highlighted. Up to now, policy formation is still inspired by the human capital theory. On the other hand policies, based on the equality of opportunities could break the vicious cycle of poverty giving true opportunities to individuals that have remained to date in the margin.

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