Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann:
In 1960, adult school attainment in Latin America was surpassed only by OECD countries... Still, economic growth in Latin America over the four decades since 1960 lagged...
The poor growth performance of Latin America despite its relatively high initial schooling level remains a puzzle by conventional thinking...
we suggest that...the level of cognitive skills is a crucial component of the long-run growth picture. What has been missing is a focus on the quality, rather than quantity, of education – ensuring that students actually learn. While Latin America has had reasonable school attainment, what students in fact know is comparatively very poor...
Figure 1 provides an aggregate picture of what this bleak performance of Latin America on the worldwide student achievement tests means for economic growth. It is based on a regional measure of performance derived from all the international math and science tests performed between 1964 and 2003...
As the figure makes patently clear, considering this low level of cognitive skills is sufficient to reconcile the poor growth performance of Latin America with outcomes in the rest of the world over the past four decades. Our interpretation is simple. Even though many things enter into economic growth and development, the cognitive skills of the population are extremely important for long-run growth.
Importantly, attending school affects economic outcomes only insofar as it actually adds to students’ learning. School attainment does not even have a significant relationship with economic growth after one accounts for cognitive skills...
The crucial missing link in explaining why Latin America went from reasonably rich in the early post-war period to relatively poor today is its low cognitive skills...
But can the cross-country association between cognitive skills and growth be interpreted as a causal effect?...
analysis of causality... results support a causal interpretation...
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