文档介绍：THE FULL SOCIAL RETURNS TO EDUCATION:
ESTIMATES BASED ON COUNTRIES' ECONOMIC GROWTH PERFORMANCE
By
Alain Mingat
Institut de Recherche sur l'Economie de l'Education (IREDU)
Université de Bourgogne
Dijon, France
and
Jee-Peng Tan
Human Development Department
The World Bank
1996
This paper has benefitted from the generous and ments of friends and colleagues. We owe special thanks to B. Chiswick, J. Hammer, E. Jimenez, J. Lane, J. van der Gaag, H. Patrinos, L. Pritchett and G. Psacharopoulos. As authors, however, we are solely responsible for all remaining errors. The views expressed in the paper are ours alone, and should not be attributed to anizations with which we are associated.
Abstract
This paper reports new estimates of the social returns to education, using countries' economic performance during 1960-85 to capture the externalities from education. The results confirm the social profitability of investing in education but indicate that the returns by level of education are sensitive to countries' economic context. To interpret our results meaningfully it is useful to make a distinction between investments to maintain existing coverage, and investments to expand it. Our findings relate mainly to the second type of investment decision in the context of the following observed initial gross enrollment ratios: 58 percent in primary education, 9 percent in secondary education, and 1 percent in higher education in low-e countries; 95 percent, 28 percent, and 4 percent, respectively, in middle-e countries; and 109 percent, 53 percent, and 9 percent, respectively, in high-e countries. Given these initial levels of coverage, our results suggest that low-e countries benefited most from investments to expand primary education, while in middle-e countries, it was investments to expand secondary education that brought the highest social returns. In the high-e countries, investing to expand coverage in higher education yielded the best returns. Investments with po