What is the big idea? The simple idea is that countries that expanded the schooling their population would have faster economic growth than those that didn’t. Turns out, pretty much every country did expand schooling, most countries expanding schooling by a lot (among developing countries by about 5 years of schooling per person), and then some grew fast (e.g. Korea) and some, who expanded schooling by about the same amount, didn’t (e.g. ). This makes it very hard to establish a robust, convincing, correlation between the expansion of schooling and economic growth. Most are now convinced that it is learning that explains growth, not the magnitude of the expansion in schooling per se. I still regard the micro-macro paradox–that Mincer regressions show very robust private returns to schooling (even when not adjusted for learning) across many countries and periods whereas this wage return does not show up in economic growth–far from resolved.
“Where Has All The Education Gone?” World Bank Economic Review, December 2001.
“Does Learning to Add up Add Up?” Chapter 11 in Handbook of Education Economics, North Holland, 2006. (Also BREAD working paper #33).
Has Education Had a Growth Payoff in the MENA Region?” MENA Regional Working Paper Series, no.1, February 1998.
“Much Higher Schooling, Much Lower Wages: Human Capital and Economic Collapse in Venezuela.” 2013. in Venezuela Before Chávez: Anatomy of and Economic Collapse. Ricardo Hausmann and Francisco R. Rodríguez eds., 2013. (with Daniel Ortega).
“Does Schooling Help Explain Any of the Big Facts about Growth?” 2009. Education and Growth. Pedro Carneiro and Michael Spence (eds). Growth Commission, 2009.
The various papers by Hanushek and Woessman on economic growth and schooling quality (Education Quality and Economic Growth, Schooling, Education Quality and the Latin America Growth Puzzle, and others) are widely considered the ‘state of the art.’