Education and economic growth: Does the East Asian education fever overstate the growth effect?

Abstract

This paper employs a cross-country regression to investigate the role of education in the growth of nations. The sample includes 101 countries over the period from 1980 to 2015. We have found that education, in general, has significant effects on economic growth. For the robustness of the results, several sensitivity tests were conducted using alternative measures of education, as well as a dummy variable to isolate an East Asian growth effect. The results were generally robust in that the growth effect of the quantity measure of schooling was statistically significant. However, the growth effect of quality measures of education was substantially mitigated and became insignificant when the East Asian effect was segregated from the regression. The results suggest that the significant growth effects of educational quality found in the literature could have been overstated because of the East Asian growth effect which was largely attributed to the education fever in East Asia.

Keywords

• O40
• I20
• J24