Abstract
In the light of educational policies in developing countries being strongly influenced by the Millenium Development Goals and foreign aid programmes, the role of education and human capital accumulation in the economic development of African countries is examined. The Solow model and the augmented Solow model including human capital were estimated using recent data on African countries (from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). The shares of the working population with three different levels of education attainment were used as alternative proxy variables for human capital. The results confirm the validity of the two models for African countries, however they also reveal some interesting discrepancies with the purely theoretical models. Firstly, the negative effect of natural growth on GDP per capita seems to be largely underestimated in theoretical considerations in the case of African countries. Secondly, the best proxy variable of human capital in African countries turns out to be the fraction of tertiary education attainment in the working population. Potential educational policy implications of the results are discussed.
Author Information
Katarzyna Joanna Błocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Institute of Econometrics, Poland
Paper Information
Conference: ACEID2018
Stream: Education for sustainable development
This paper is part of the ACEID2018 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window
Comments
Powered by WP LinkPress