n.a.
This article proposes an approach to answering two questions: first, does investment in education help growth; second, does the allocation of investment in education matter? I develop a model where individual ability is heterogeneous and education both trains students and reveals their suitability for further training. I use UNESCO data on educational enrollments and spending to estimate the efficiency of existing educational allocations in a panel of countries. A cross-country growth decomposition regression shows that the correlation of human capital capital accumulation and GDP growth is not significant in countries with poor allocations but is significant and positive in countries with better allocations.
A vast literature uses cross-country regressions to search for empirical linkages between long-run growth rates and a variety of economic policy, political, and institutional indicators. This paper examines whether the conclusions from existing studies are robust or fragile to small changes in the conditioning information set. The authors find that almost all results are fragile. They do, however, identify a positive, robust correlation between growth and the share of investment in GDP and between the investment share and the ratio of international trade to GDP. The authors clarify the conditions under which there is evidence of per capita output convergence.
This paper examines the extent to which patterns of human capital convergence can account for observed patterns of income inequality between countries. To do this I decompose national income into three components: one due to education levels, one reflecting the return to education, and a residual component. I then examine in turn the contribution of each of them to changes in income dispersion. Among the developed countries, convergence in education levels has resulted in a reduction in income dispersion. However, for the world as a whole, incomes have diverged despite substantial convergence in education levels. This is a result of increases in the return to education that favor the developed countries at the expense of the less developed countries.
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