Schooling, Cognitive Skills, and the Latin American Growth Puzzle
By Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann. Social Science Research Network, 2009
144 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which Latin American countries consistently perform at the bottom. In growth models estimated across world regions, these low levels of cognitive skills can account for the poor growth performance of Latin America. Given the limitations of worldwide tests in discriminating performance at low levels, we also introduce measures from two regional tests designed to measure performance for all Latin American countries with internationally comparable income data. Our growth analysis using these data confirms the significant effects of cognitive skills on intra-regional variations. Splicing the new regional tests into the worldwide tests, we also confirm this effect in extended worldwide regressions, although it appears somewhat smaller in the regional Latin American data than in the worldwide data.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e8b634e58cc90a98fe9dd0ceebe3d87aaffd041
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Eric A. Hanushek
- Ludger Woessmann
- Ludger Wößmann
- J. Metzler
- Todd Schoellman
- Steven G. Rivkin
- Trung V. Vu
- C. Diebolt
Citations in the corpus
- Schooling, educational achievement, and the Latin American growth puzzle (2012, background): “The Dominican Republic was excluded as the sole remaining Caribbean country, which turns out to be a strong outlier if included in the growth analysis (see Hanushek and Woessmann (2009)).”
- The Impact of Teacher Subject Knowledge on Student Achievement: Evidence from Within-Teacher Within-Student Variation (2010, background): “Its average performance on international student achievement tests is dismal compared to developed countries (cf. OECD 2003) and just below the average of other Latin American countries.”