Where Has All the Education Gone?

Abstract

Cross national data show no association between increases in educational capital due to rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker. This implies the association of growth of educational capital and conventional measures of TFP is large, strongly statistically significant, and negative. While these are the regression results “on average ” (from imposing a constant coefficient) it should be obvious the impact of education has not been the same in every country. There are three explanations for why the impact of education has varied and has so often fallen short of what was hoped. First, perhaps educational has been so low that “years of schooling ” have created no human capital. Second, perhaps the marginal returns to education fell rapidly as supply expanded while demand for educated labor was stagnant. Third, perhaps the institutional environment has been sufficiently perverse that the educational capital accumulation lowered economic growth. Some mix of the three explanations plays a role in most developing countries. 2 Where has all the education gone? 1 To be a successful pirate one needs to know a great deal about naval warfare, the trade routes of commercial shipping; the armament, rigging, and crew size of potential victims;

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 220 citations exist upstream.