Education economics

Education economics or the economics of education is the study of economic issues relating to education, including the demand for education, the financing and provision of education, and the comparative efficiency of various educational programs and policies. From early works on the relationship between schooling and labor market outcomes for individuals, the field of the economics of education has grown rapidly to cover virtually all areas with linkages to education. Education economics or the economics of education is the study of economic issues relating to education, including the demand for education, the financing and provision of education, and the comparative efficiency of various educational programs and policies. From early works on the relationship between schooling and labor market outcomes for individuals, the field of the economics of education has grown rapidly to cover virtually all areas with linkages to education. Economics distinguishes in addition to physical capital another form of capital that is no less critical as a means of production – human capital. With investments in human capital, such as education, three major economic effects can be expected: Investments in human capital entail an investment cost, just as any investment does. Typically in European countries most education expenditure takes the form of government consumption, although some costs are also borne by individuals. These investments can be rather costly. EU governments spent between 3% and 8% of GDP on education in 2005, the average being 5%. However, measuring the spending this way alone greatly underestimates the costs because a more subtle form of costs is completely overlooked: the opportunity cost of forgone wages as students cannot work while they study. It has been estimated that the total costs, including opportunity costs, of education are as much as double the direct costs.Including opportunity costs investments in education can be estimated to have been around 10% of GDP in the EU countries in 2005. In comparison investments in physical capital were 20% of GDP. Thus the two are of similar magnitude. Human capital in the form of education shares many characteristics with physical capital. Both require an investment to create and, once created, both have economic value. Physical capital earns a return because people are willing to pay to use a piece of physical capital in work as it allows them to produce more output. To measure the productive value of physical capital, we can simply measure how much of a return it commands in the market. In the case of human capital calculating returns is more complicated – after all, we cannot separate education from the person to see how much it rents for.To get around this problem, the returns to human capital are generally inferred from differences in wages among people with different levels of education. Hall and Jones have calculated from international data that on average that the returns on education are 13.4% per year for first four years of schooling (grades 1–4), 10.1% per year for the next four years (grades 5–8) and 6.8% for each year beyond eight years. Thus someone with 12 years of schooling can be expected to earn, on average, 1.1344 × 1.1014 × 1.0684 = 3.161 times as much as someone with no schooling at all. Economy-wide, the effect of human capital on incomes has been estimated to be rather significant: 65% of wages paid in developed countries is payments to human capital and only 35% to raw labor. The higher productivity of well-educated workers is one of the factors that explain higher GDPs and, therefore, higher incomes in developed countries. A strong correlation between GDP and education is clearly visible among the countries of the world, as is shown by the upper left figure. It is less clear, however, how much of a high GDP is explained by education. After all, it is also possible that rich countries can simply afford more education. To distinguish the part of GDP explained with education from other causes, Weil has calculated how much one would expect each country’s GDP to be higher based on the data on average schooling. This was based on the above-mentioned calculations of Hall and Jones on the returns on education. GDPs predicted by Weil’s calculations can be plotted against actual GDPs, as is done in the figure on the left, demonstrating that the variation in education explains some, but not all, of the variation in GDP. Finally, the matter of externalities should be considered. Usually when speaking of externalities one thinks of the negative effects of economic activities that are not included in market prices, such as pollution. These are negative externalities. However, there are also positive externalities – that is, positive effects of which someone can benefit without having to pay for it.Education bears with it major positive externalities: giving one person more education raises not only his or her output but also the output of those around him or her. Educated workers can bring new technologies, methods and information to the consideration of others. They can teach things to others and act as an example. The positive externalities of education include the effects of personal networks and the roles educated workers play in them. Positive externalities from human capital are one explanation for why governments are involved in education. If people were left on their own, they would not take into account the full social benefit of education – in other words the rise in the output and wages of others – so the amount they would choose to obtain would be lower than the social optimum. A 2013 study assesses demand- and supply-side factors that affect educational access and attainment in development countries, and it shows that addressing demand-side factors, such as geographic gaps between rural and urban areas, higher levels of population growth (which place constant pressure on new enrolments) and child labour, can often have greater impact on increasing levels of education in developing countries than supply-side factors, such as constructing additionalschool facilities, hiring more teachers etc.