Education economics

Education economics or the economics of education is the study of economic issues relating to education, including the demand for education and the financing and provision of education. 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.

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