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The Role of Education Quality for Economic Growth
ERIC A. HANUSHEK and LUDGER WOESSMANN
From the mid-1960s to today, international agencies have conducted many international tests of students’ performance in cognitive skills such as mathematics and science (see the appendix to this section for details). Employing a re-scaling method that makes performance at different international tests comparable (again, see appendix), we can use performance on these standardized tests as a proxy for the quality of education. Figure 4.1 presents average student performance on twelve testing occasions37 on the transformed scale which maps performance on each test to the scale of the recent PISA international test. This scale has a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100 among the OECD countries in PISA.38 As is obvious from the figure, the developing countries that ever participated in one of the tests perform dramatically lower than any country in the group of OECD countries. The variation in the quality of education that exists among OECD countries is already substantial, but the magnitude of the difference to developing countries in the average amount of learning that has taken place after a given number of years of schooling dwarfs any within-OECD difference.
Over the past ten years, empirical growth research demonstrates that consideration of the quality of education, measured by the cognitive skills learned, alters the assessment of the role of education in the process of economic development dramatically. When using the data from the international student achievement tests through 1991 to build a measure of educational quality, Hanushek and Kimko (2000) – first released as Hanushek and Kim (1995) – find a statistically and economically significant positive effect of the quality of education on economic growth in 1960-1990 that dwarfs the association between quantity of education and growth. Thus, even more than in the case of education and individual earnings, ignoring quality differences very significantly misses the true importance of education for economic growth. Their estimates suggest that one country-level standard deviation (equivalent to 47 test-score points in PISA 2000 mathematics, on whose scale Figure 4.1 is based) higher test performance would yield around one percentage point higher annual growth rates.
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