The Role of School Improvement in Economic Development

By Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Wößmann. Social Science Research Network, 2007

345 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of educational quality. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population - rather than mere school attainment - are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empirical results show the importance of both minimal and high level skills, the complementarity of skills and the quality of economic institutions, and the robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing countries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The magnitude of change needed makes clear that closing the economic gap with developed countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0932d33783092f4ff3f334e7d82a9312aa65515

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Citations in the corpus

Workforce Skills and Innovation: An Overview of Major Themes in the Literature. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 55. (2011, background): “This neglect of cross-country differences in the quality of education is probably the major drawback of such a quantitative measure of schooling’ (Hanushek and Woessmann 2007: 21).”
National Income, Income Inequality, and the Importance of Schools: A Hierarchical Cross-National Comparison (2009, background): “Considerable evidence suggests that differences in national educational achievement are strongly related to differences in economic growth (Barro, 2001; Hanushek & Kimko, 2000, Hanushek & Woessman, 2007).”
The importance of socio-economic status in determining educational achievement in South Africa (2009, background): “Hanushek and Woessmann (2007) extend this literature by adjusting for the quality of education in specifications of earnings functions.”
What Really Works to Improve Learning in Developing Countries? An Analysis of Divergent Findings in Systematic Reviews (2015, background): “unsurprisingly—that additional years of schooling have little impact on economic growth in the absence of learning, which is a function of education quality (Hanushek and Wo¨ßmann 2007).”
Education Quality and Development Accounting (2012, methodology): “The data used here were constructed by Hanushek and Woessmann (2009) by aggregating the results from a number of tests administered between 1964 and 2003.”
Do Students Care about School Quality? Determinants of Dropout Behavior in Developing Countries (2008, background): “Hanushek and Zhang (2006) provide international comparisons of the returns to cognitive skills for 13 countries, although they are heavily weighted toward developed countries.”