Immigrant Qualifications: Recognition and Relative Wage Outcomes

Abstract

Australian society is most unusual in that it is characterized by relatively large numbers of immigrants, many of whom are ostensibly skilled workers. This empirical exercise used a data set compiled under the auspices of the Commonwealth Government. The data revealed that around 39 percent of skilled immigrants chose to subject their overseas qualifications to local assessment and, of these, 42 percent were recognized as being equivalent to their Australian counterpart. The econometric wage estimations reveal that immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, as a whole, received low increments as a consequence of overseas qualifications compared to those having Australian qualifications.