Investigation of regularities of occurrence of external effects of education and their significance for the economic development

Abstract

The aim of the research is to assess the quantitative impact of education on the emergence of externalities and economic development. It has been shown that the increase in the education of specialists in interaction with innovative activity contributes to the emergence of external effects, which have a high level of significance for economic dynamics. As a result, the total contribution to GDP, as a result of an additional year of study for a specialist with a higher education, increases by about 50%. Realizing this effect, the largest economies of the world (the USA, the European Union, China and Japan) have been increasing the share of specialists with tertiary (vocational) education approximately linearly at a rate of 0,8 ±0,2% per year over the past 25 years. For Russia, the positive effect of a high level of tertiary education is significantly reduced due to the problems of interaction with the economic environment. The income that innovators themselves receive is, in a significant proportion of cases, relatively small. In particular, for the «Open Distance Education» innovation, the innovator's income was about 0,3% of the income of other recipients of benefits from the innovation. A significantly large share of the income from innovation is realized as an external effect of other users of the innovation, especially the consumers of the manufactured products and followers. Quantitative estimates of the external contribution to GDP of the innovation «Open Distance Education» show that they amount to about 14 thousand dollars per graduate, and only 340 million dollars a year. The findings can be used to assess the impact of education and develop strategies for staff training and innovation development.

Keywords

• innovation
• distance learning
• externalities
• human capital
• return on education
• gdp
• economic development
• r&d