Education and country growth models

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The over-arching concern of the three parts of the dissertation is how economics canand should influence education policymaking, the emphasis on the economics sidebeing models of country development and the contribution made by human capital.Part I begins with a review of economic growth theory. How educational performanceand country development have been measured is then discussed, with considerableattention going towards conceptual and measurement complexities associated with thelatter. An approach is presented for expanding the number of countries whoseeducational quality can be compared, by expanding the number of linkable testingprogrammes. This approach, which above all allows for the inclusion of more Africanand Latin American countries, is one of the key contributions made by the dissertationto the existing body of knowledge. Three existing empirical growth models areexamined, including work by Hanushek and Woessman on the relationship betweeneducational quality and income. Part I ends with a discussion on how the economicsliterature can best be packaged to influence education policymaking. A 'growthsimulator' tool in Excel for informing the policy discourse is presented. Theproduction of this tool includes establishing empirically a feasible improvementtrajectory for educational quality that policymakers can use and some analysis of howlinguistic fractionalisation in a country evolves over time. This tool can be considereda further key output of the dissertation. A basic model for relating educational quality,via income growth, to teacher pay, is presented.Part II offers an analysis of UNESCO country-level data on enrolment and spendinggoing back to 1970, with a view to establishing historical patterns that can informeducation planners, particularly those in developing countries, on how budgets andenrolment expansion should be distributed across the levels of the education system.The analysis presented in Part II represents a novel way of using existing countryleveldata and can be seen as an important step towards filling a gap experienced byeducation policymakers, namely the paucity of empirical evidence that can guidedecisions around the prioritisation of education levels. Part II moreover arrives at afew empirical findings, including the finding that enrolment and spending patternshave been systematically different in countries with faster economic growth and thefinding that historical per student spending at the secondary level appears to play alarger role in development than was previously thought.Part III contrasts the available economic advice for education policymakers with whatpolicymakers actually appear to believe in. The focus falls, in particular, on fourdeveloping countries: South Africa, Brazil, Chile and China. A few areas whereeconomists could explore the data to a greater degree or communicate availablefindings differently, in the interests of better education policies, are identified. Part IIIpartly serves as a demonstration of how comparisons between education systems canbe better oriented towards providing advice to education policymakers on questionsrelating to efficiency and equity.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University