Social Returns to Education: Macro-Evidence

Summary This paper presents new evidence on the social returns to education within a macroeconomic growth regression framework. I use improved schooling data and a macro version of the Mincer relationship between education and wages for individual workers. The results suggest that an increase by one year of the average education level of the labor force would increase labor productivity by 7–10% in the short run and by 11–15% in the long run. Some evidence is found for the presence of dynamic human capital spillovers: the human capital stock increases prospective economic growth. The empirical results are used to quantify the macroeconomic impact of skill upgrading as agreed upon in the European Union’s Lisbon strategy for growth and jobs. Finally, the paper discusses discrepancies between private and social returns to education. I would like to thank two referees, Dinand Webbink, Peter Wobst, and participants of the brown bag lunch seminar series at the Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General of the European Commission for helpful comments. Views expressed are my own, and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the European Commission or the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.     

FDI,Education, and Economic Growth: Quality Matters

In this paper, we revisit the results from the influential study by Borensztein et al. (Journal of International Economics 45:115–135, 1998), which argues that inward foreign direct investment (FDI) promotes the economic growth in a less developed host country only when the host country obtains a threshold level of secondary schooling. Borensztein et al. (Journal of International Economics 45:115–135, 1998) only focus on the quantity of education. We take into consideration both the quantity and the quality of education. We adjust the original schooling data in Borensztein et al. (Journal of International Economics 45:115–135, 1998) by two quality of education indices and re-estimate their model. We find that the complementarity between inward FDI and schooling still exists, but the threshold level of schooling in our study is lower than the threshold calculated in Borensztein et al. (Journal of International Economics 45:115–135, 1998). Our results support the importance of education quality and suggest that with improved quality of education, it does not take as much quantity of schooling, as established in Borensztein et al. (Journal of International Economics 45:115–135, 1998), for inward FDI to have a positive impact on economic growth in the host country.     

国际人口迁移、信贷约束与人力资本积累

本文以收入不平等与经济增长的关系为基础,在信贷市场不完全的条件下,进一步考察了熟练劳动力跨国迁移对发展中国家人力资本积累及经济增长的影响。分析显示,基于跨国移民的"教育激励"效应对发展中国家的人力资本积累及经济增长的影响在短期和长期存在差异。短期中,基于跨国移民的"教育激励"效应会减缓"人才流失"效应对发展中国家人力资本积累及经济增长的负面影响,甚至可能会提高发展中国家熟练劳动力的比重,从而促进人均收入水平的提高。长期中,当代际转移收敛于稳态水平时,国际人口迁移不再具有"教育激励"效应,而国际人口迁移的"人才流失"效应则会继续损害人力资本积累,从而对发展中国家的人均收入产生负面影响。     

Government Bias in Education,Schooling Attainment,and Long‐Run Growth

A surprising cross‐country stylized fact is that higher public spending on education tends to lower the long‐run growth rate of per capita GDP and the returns to schooling. This is contrary to the conventional wisdom that education is a major driver of growth. In this article, we revisit this issue and try to understand these puzzling facts in terms of an endogenous growth model. Our cross‐country calibration of the growth model predicts that countries with a greater government involvement in education experience lower schooling efforts and lower growth.     

Does Education Still Pay Off in Rural China： Revisit the Impact of Education on Off-farm Employment and Wages

The present study considers how education affects off-farm job participation and wages. We use a nationally representative dataset from a survey conducted in 5 provinces, 101 villages and 808 households by the authors in early 2005. The empirical results show that educational attainment, skill training and years of experience of rural residents have positive, statistically significant effects on off-farm employment. The average return to a year of education is 7percent, which is higher than those observed in previous studies. We also find the return to an additional year of schooling to be higher for post-junior high schooling than for junior high and below schooling： 11.8 versus 3.2 percent. We conclude that not only does education still pays off in rural China, but also the rate of return to education is increasing over time.     

How to Model a Child in School? A Dynamic Macrosimulation Study for Tanzania

Universal primary education is regarded as one of the key pillars of sustainable development. The positive influence of education on growth is supported by many empirical studies. However, the effects of education on labour supply, poverty reduction and welfare as well as subsistence agriculture are hardly traceable in an econometric set‐up, given the complex interactions and the long‐term nature of education. An economy‐wide dynamic simulation model provides a well‐suited toolkit to analyse the effects of increased school provision in these aspects and provides insights into the intertemporal aspects of the schooling decision of children. We develop a macroeconomic model that explicitly includes education and human capital allocation, and takes into account that the possibility of child labour increases the opportunity costs of human capital formation. In an application for Tanzania, we find that a large‐scale investment programme in education might have a negative effect on both gross domestic product (GDP) growth and high‐skilled labour supply in the short term but leads to higher GDP and welfare as well as significantly reduced child labour supply in the medium to long term.     

How Does Social Trust Affect Economic Growth?

This article connects two strands of the literature on social trust by directly estimating the effects of trust on growth through a set of potential transmission mechanisms. It does so by modeling the process using a 3SLS estimator on a sample of 85 countries for which a full data set is available. The results indicate that trust affects schooling and the rule of law directly, thereby raising economic growth rates. The article closes with a short discussion of the relevance of the findings.     

Intergenerational transmission of education: The case of rural China

The intergenerational transmission of education has received considerable attention in recent empirical research in many countries. However, the research on intergenerational transmission of education in China is still relatively rare. This paper investigates the impact of parental schooling on their children's schooling in rural China using the data collected by the authors themselves. Our results show that (i) the intergenerational transmission of education in rural China is not as high as those have been reported in the literature for several other countries;(ii) There exists significant transmission effect of education in the subgroup born after the 1980s, but not for those who were born in the year of 1980 onward. The results also stand up to several different tests and robustness checks. Our findings suggest that promoting the equal education opportunity and investing in children of disadvantaged group will have long-term effects for the accumulation of human capital. China can promote increasing gains for its acquisition of human capital, and tap into this foundation for sustainable growth and development in the future.     

电子商务时代的技术创新、人力资本与经济增长

本文将技术创新、交易成本和人力资本引入经济增长模型，求出最优人力资本投入．并结合交易成本分析电子商务对经济增长和人力资本的影响。研究发现，在新经济时代．由于技术创新和知识累积使交易成本降低，就长期而言，人们会增加入力资本用于生产的比例．而减少用于教育的比例。在静态均衡分析中，本文进一步讨论人均消费、人均产出和人均资本增长率与交易成本、技术创新及知识累积的关系。     

Wage Returns to Schooling in Nigeria

Abstract: In the last two decades, primary and secondary school enrollment rates have declined in Nigeria while enrollment rates in post‐secondary school have increased. This paper estimates from the General Household Survey for Nigeria the private returns to schooling associated with levels of educational attainment for wage and self‐employed workers. The estimates for both men and women are small at primary and secondary levels, 2–4 percent, but are substantial at post‐secondary education level, 10–15 percent. These schooling return estimates may account for the recent trends in enrollments. Thus, increasing public investment to encourage increased attendance in basic education is not justifiable on grounds of private efficiency, unless investments to increase school quality have higher private returns. With high private returns to post‐secondary schooling, students at this level should pay tuition, to recoup more of the public costs of schooling, which may be redistributed to poor families through scholarships.     

Resource‐led Development: An Illustrative Example from Nigeria

Abstract: Several strategies are open to an economy in its attempt to attain sustainable economic development, depending on its historical background and resource endowment. One such strategy is the resource‐led strategy. Nigeria is very rich in crude oil and has reaped billions of petrodollars. However, the country faces the problem of successfully translating this huge oil wealth into sustainable development. This paper employs the vector error correction technique in examining the long‐run impact of the huge oil wealth accruing to Nigeria on its economic development. Basic indicators such as growth, private consumption, infrastructure (electricity), agriculture and manufacturing output growth rates are examined. The empirical results suggest a significant positive long‐run impact of per capita oil revenue on per capita household consumption and electricity generation while a negative relationship is established for GDP, agriculture and manufacturing. Even for those with a negative relationship at current period, there exist positive relationships at subsequent lags. Thus, oil revenue, if properly managed and invested, could be effectively used to induce oil‐led development for Nigeria provided that the initial inhibitions of corruption, lack of transparency, accountability and fairness in its use and distribution are removed.     

The Role of Property Rights in the Relationship between Capital Flows and Economic Growth in SSA: Do Natural Resources Endowment and Country Income Level Matter?

This paper studies the role played by the quality of property rights in the linkages of international capital flows into sub‐Saharan African (SSA) economies. Using panel data of 36 SSA countries over the period 1996–2015 and the ARDL procedure with the Pooled Mean Group regression method appropriate for non‐stationary panel data estimation, we account for the joint effects of property rights quality and openness to foreign capital flows on economic growth. We uncover the existence of a property rights quality threshold beyond which property rights either amplifies the spillovers effects or attenuates the negative effect of capital flows on economic growth. For instance, it takes a level of property rights of at least 60 to have a positive long‐term impact of capital flows on economic growth in natural resource‐poor African countries. The quality of property rights matters more to obtain spillover effects of capital flows on growth in natural resource‐poor countries than in their peer natural resource‐rich countries. Finally, with regard to the countries' income levels, capital flows have significant long‐term spillovers effects on economic growth in advanced African economies than in their low‐income peers.     

Gender,ethnicity, and unequal opportunity in colonial Uganda: European influences,African realities,and the pitfalls of parish register data

The renaissance of African economic history in the past decade has opened up new research avenues for studying the long‐term social and economic development of Africa. A sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies and a critical stance towards the use of new sources and approaches is crucial. In this article, we engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf to show how selection biases in, and Eurocentric interpretations of, parish registers have provoked an overly optimistic account of European influences on the educational and occupational opportunities of African men and women. We confront their dataset, drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican Cathedral in Kampala, with Uganda's 1991 census, and show that trends in the literacy and numeracy of men and women born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral. We run a regression analysis showing that access to schooling during the colonial era was unequal along lines of gender and ethnicity. We foreground the role of Africans in the spread of education, and we argue that European influences were not just diffusive but also divisive, and that gender inequality was reconfigured rather than eliminated under colonial rule.     

Inflation and Economic Growth in China： An Empirical Analysis

Using official provincial data for gross provincial product, consumer price index and other explanatory variables from 1986 to 2006, the present paper investigates the nonlinear effects of inflation on economic growth in China. The main finding of the study is that the inflation threshold effect is highly significant and robust in China. Above the 2.50 percent threshold, every 1‐percentage point increase in the inflation rate impedes economic growth by 0.61 percent; below this threshold, every 1‐percentage point increase in the inflation rate stimulates growth by 0.53 percent. This indicates that high inflation harms economic growth, whereas moderate inflation benefits growth. We suggest that China should maintain a moderate inflation rate for long‐run growth.     

Sociological challenges for Egypt’s development: 1981–2013

This paper examines the extent to which women’s education, fertility rate, corruption and urbanization affects long-term economic growth in Egypt. We are particularly interested in the impact of female education and fertility rate on economic growth, but we also examine the relationship between economic growth and corruption. The results suggest that investments in female education can reduce fertility rate with a small but significant immediate effect. As the fertility rate increases real GDP growth decreases with a lag of 2 years. The immediate effect of greater female education on real GDP is negative but overall it has a positive impact when lags are taken into account. Interestingly, the immediate effect of urbanization on real GDP growth was negative and turned to be positive on the long run. Finally, corruption was found to have a negative impact on GDP growth in Egypt over our studied time period.     

Competitiveness and Efficiency of the Banking Sector and Economic Growth in Egypt

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of financial reforms on competitiveness and production efficiency of the banking sector, as well as the short‐term and long‐term impact on economic growth, in Egypt during 1992–2007. The results suggest that the reforms have a positive and significant effect on competitiveness and production efficiency. Also, the evidence shows that state‐owned banks are generally less competitive than private banks and foreign banks are less competitive than domestic banks. The average x‐inefficiency of Egyptian banks is around 30 per cent, which is comparable to those reported for other African countries. Finally, there is evidence to suggest a significant relationship between financial bank productive efficiency and economic growth in the short run but not in the long run. Overall, the results support the argument for continuing the financial sector reform programme in Egypt.     

Early Experience and Later Outcomes of Education: Schooling Transition Evidence from Indonesia

This paper investigates the effect of early school experience on later educational attainment. Using the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), we find that students who repeat a grade at primary school are less likely to progress to junior high school. We also find that grade retention is associated with lower rates of transition from junior high school to senior high school. The relationship persists across years and samples. Meanwhile, the age of students when starting school and the hours they spend there have limited effects on whether they continue their schooling. We also observe that the effects of parental education and household income on the transition of students from primary school to junior high school are weakening. Given the long-term impact of grade retention, policymakers should be cautious when recommending it for underachieving children and should look for alternatives.     

Does Schooling Promote Economic Growth?

Abstract: This paper revisits the debate on schooling and economic growth with particular reference to the case of sub‐Saharan Africa. Following the endogenous growth model developed by Lucas (1988) that considers human capital as one factor of production and schooling as a means of human capital accumulation, two results of schooling are explicitly stated: accumulation of privately owned and publicly owned human capital. By developing a growth estimating equation containing these two types of schooling results from the model and confronting it with empirical data, the hypothesis that schooling has got growth effect is tested. The analytic result suggests that in the indicated economies, for the period covered by the study (1966–2000), schooling that leads to accumulation of publicly owned human capital is associated with per capita income growth. Likewise, the analysis provides supporting evidence for the argument that primary schooling level is more associated with growth than other levels of schooling.     

Does Life Expectancy Affect Private Educational Investment in China？

In this paper, we emphasize the interactive effect between life expectancy and human capital accumulation, and test the positive feedback of longevity to educational investment in China. This is very important for understanding the pressure from the aging population and the increase in private educational investment in China. We first show in an extended human capital investment model that life expectancy growth acts as a driving force for educational investment. We then build a difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences empirical framework and use cross‐province data to examine the effect in China. We use the maternal mortality rate (MMR) to identify the difference in life expectancy between genders, and the illiteracy rate or average years of education by gender for educational investment. The empirical results comply with the theory, in that increases in life expectancy significantly lower illiteracy rates and improve the average schooling years in China. This content of the present paper is closely related to crucial issues like population aging, human capital accumulation and gender discrimination. Policy implications are discussed based on the empirical results.     

Impact of International Remittances on Schooling in the Philippines: Does the Relationship to the Household Head Matter?

We study the impact of international remittances on schooling in the Philippines, taking into account the school‐age individual's relationship to the household head. This consideration is important because employment opportunities abroad may be taken at the expense of the quality of child rearing. Our estimation results indicate that there are, indeed, significant negative guardian effects on school attendance and education expenditures when children with overseas parents are looked after by a relative other than a parent or grandparent. However, these negative effects tend to be outweighed by the positive impact of remittance flows from overseas.