Page 16 - Education and Inclusive Growth --Jong-Wha Lee Korea University

162 ᐿ࿲ၾආӉj઺ԃٙɢඎ

for the given values of initial per worker output and the external environmental

variables of X Most of previous researches find a positive value of β indicating
2
i,t
that a higher level of human capital, proxied by educational attainment of the
working-age population, tends to increase output growth, controlling for other

important factors.
However, previous empirical studies based on cross-country regressions
often estimate statistically insignificant coefficient for the overall years of

schooling, indicating a weak or insignificant effect of overall educational
attainment on output growth (Pritchett, 2001; Barro and Lee, 2015). This
result may come from the inaccuracy of the average years of schooling as a

measure of human capital stock, for example, because it does not take account
of differences in the quality of schooling across countries and over time. It may
also come from that not years of overall schooling but those of schooling at

some specific levels matter for economic growth. Some empirical studies, such
as Barro and Lee (1994, 2015), finds that only secondary and tertiary levels of
schooling are important, implying that workers with high educational attainment
stimulate physical capital accumulation and facilitate technological progress,

thereby contributing to per worker GDP growth.
An interesting result from cross-country regressions is that female

educational attainment enters positively while male attainment enters negatively
(Barro and Lee, 2015). Thus, an increase in female school attainment{for given
values of male educational attainment and other explanatory variables{has a
positive effect on economic growth. This could be interpreted as that raising

female’s educational attainment level up to male’s would create better economic
and social environments that are more favorable for economic growth.