Publication: Where Has All the Education Gone?
Date
2001-09
ISSN
Published
2001-09
Author(s)
Pritchett, Lant
Abstract
Cross-national data show no association
between increases in human capital attributable to the
rising educational attainment of the labor force and the
rate of growth of output per worker. This implies that the
association of educational capital growth with conventional
measures of total factor production is large, strongly
statistically significant, and negative. These are 'on
average' results, derived from imposing a constant
coefficient. However, the development impact of education
varied widely across countries and has fallen short of
expectations for three possible reasons. First, the
institutional/governance environment could have been
sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educational
capital lowered economic growth. Second, marginal returns to
education could have fallen rapidly as the supply of
educated labor expanded while demand remained stagnant.
Third, educational quality could have been so low that years
of schooling created no human capital. The extent and mix of
these three phenomena vary from country to country in
explaining the actual economic impact of education, or the
lack thereof.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Pritchett, Lant. 2001. Where Has All the Education Gone?. World Bank Economic Review. © Washington, DC: World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17434 License: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO.”
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World Bank Economic Review
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