نقش کیفیت و کمیت آموزشی در فرآیند توسعه اقتصادی

We develop a theory of human capital investment to study the effects of school quality on student choices of education, and to understand its effect on economic growth. In a dynamic general equilibrium closed economy, primary education is mandatory but there is an opportunity to continue to secondary education and beyond. High-quality education increases the returns to schooling, and hence the incentives to accumulate human capital. This is caused by two different channels: higher quality makes education accessible to more people (extensive margin), and once individuals decide to participate in higher education, higher-quality increases the investment made per individual (intensive margin). Furthermore, educational quality determines human capital composition and growth. Cross-country data evidence shows that the proposed channels are quantitatively important and that the effect of the quality and quantity of education on growth depends on the stage of development.

This paper seeks to understand what drives schooling decisions regarding higher education (i.e., secondary and tertiary education) and why educational attainment levels differ widely with the level of economic development. Two salient features are worth noting. First, most of the population in poor coutries have only a primary education or none at all. Second, higher education attainments increases with income and differs substantially across countries. Possible explanations for this could be, for example, the typical credit constraints story (e.g., Galor and Zeira, 1993 and Mookherjee and Ray, 2003) and the existence of skill-biased technical change (e.g., Galor & Moav, 2000). In this paper, we analyze an alternative explanation that posits cross-country differences in the quality of the educational system. As preliminary evidence of how important the quality of education may be, we plot enrollment rates in secondary education and a measure of educational quality in each country.1 The results are striking. Fig. 1 shows a positive correlation between educational quality and enrollment rates in secondary schooling when the quality of education is relatively high—a correlation that disappears when the quality of the educational system is below a threshold level. Moreover, the upper and lower extremes in the figure also show that, on average, the countries with a high-quality educational system are mainly the high-income OECD economies, whereas those with low-quality educational systems are the less-developed countries.2

So far, most of the theoretical and empirical literature on human capital and development has focused mainly on the quantity of schooling. This paper reconsiders the role of human capital by emphasizing the importance of the qualitative aspects of education and their effect on schooling decisions about higher education. Our proposed theory implies that, when primary schooling is compulsory and publicly provided, educational quality may affect economic growth by increasing the extensiveness—expanding access to more agents—as well as the intensiveness—increasing the investment made by each agent—of the accumulation of human capital beyond primary education. Our results further suggest that educational quality plays a central role in the composition of human capital and in the long-run level of income. Using cross-country data, we find evidence supporting these predictions of the theory.