Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello, my name is Paul Glewwe.
I'm a professor in the Department
of Applied Economics
at the University of Minnesota.
And I'm going to give a talk
on education in developing countries.
0:12
So education has sort of a dual role
in economic development.
First, it is an objective
in its own right,
people want to be educated
and they want their children
to be educated,
but it is also a means
for attaining other objectives
because educated people
usually have higher incomes,
they have better health,
there are other things that education
helps people to accomplish.
There are many ways to obtain education,
the most common way
is by formal schooling
but you can also get education
outside of school
and learning on the job
and things like that.
That's sort of from a microeconomic
perspective.
From a macroeconomic perspective,
education is thought to be a key
determinant of economic growth,
although this is very hard
to prove in a very rigorous way.
Another reason education is important
is how much money
is spent on education.
We have good data
on government spending,
and in developing countries alone,
not even counting developed countries,
but developing countries alone,
about $1 trillion is spent
on education per year.
This is at, you know, primary education,
secondary education,
post-secondary education.
In addition, parents spend
a lot of their own money
on schooling for their kids.
And college age people
or university age people
spend their own money on education.
So a lot of money is spent.
But we don't have as good a data
on how much the parents or the students
are spending on their education.
And so the basic purpose of this talk
is to discuss, well,
what are we getting for this money,
both in terms of kids going to school
and kids learning
while they're in school.
So that's what I'll be talking about.
And the first thing to point out,
and I'll show you a slide in a second,
is that there have been
very large increases
in school enrollment and attainment
in terms of years of schooling
in developing countries
since 1960, which is a good news.
On the other hand, the bad news
is that there's a lot of evidence
that schools are not very effective
in terms of kids learning a lot
when they're in school.
