The Effects of Education on the Development of CountriesSince the end of the Second World War, education has played an increasingly important role in the development of countries, especially in the economic, sociological and political aspects. This trend, however, can be strongly proved by Japan. According to the study by Hood (2001), through Japan’s second education reform, Japans modernization was greatly accelerated, which led Japan to become one of the world powers. There may be a variety of related factors leading to the development of Japan, but the primary cause is education. This essay will state how education promotes politics, the economy and society; especially illustrate how education has a great influence on increasing income, reducing poverty, declining fertility, improving health status and influencing policies and people’s enthusiasm in participating politics.
The effects education has on the economy can be specific to increasing income, which can spur the economic growth. First, according to research by Case (2006), people with higher education can receive a higher income. In both developing and developed countries, better educated workers earn higher wages on average than less educated workers. As workers receive higher education, they have more professional skills and have better abilities to learn new skills and communicate with customers, who bring a greater profit for their companies; correspondingly, they can receive a higher income. Additionally, the research points out that most companies think work ethic and capacity have relations with educational level, as companies cannot judge the workers’ work ethic and capacity exactly from common recruitment examinations. Second, education plays an important role in GDP per capita, which can directly shows per-capita income level of a country. According to research by Baldacci, Clement sand Gupta (2005), having 3 additional years of schooling is associated with an increase in education spending of 1 percent of the GDP. In addition, in 15 years, where the GDP per capita increases 1 percent every year, the initial number of poor decreases 17 percent on average. In other words, education can promote GDP per capita growth.
Evidence has also shown that education has important effects on reducing poverty, which can be benefit for further development of the economy. First, education is an effective way to reduce the number of poor. If more people receive higher education, they can find better jobs with higher wages and then the number of poor will be decreased. According to a study by Coulombe, Jean, and Sylvie (2004), to date, researchers have found that in developing countries, enrollment rates of schooling have had a positive relationship with GDP growth because of an increase in the number of educated people. In addition, the study points out that if a country’s literacy scores become higher, the growth of annual per capita GDP will be more significant. This is because that if a country owns
a good education then the government may have a huge interest in the outcomes of that education. Second, education can enhance well-being, which is why, in the past year, the UK—at the highest levels of the OECD to date—led the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—the world’s leading state-owned and private organization for higher education—to increase access to higher education.[9] Thus, the link between education and living standards has not been understood by economists, economists or policy makers. As an example, consider the role which education has played to promote the growth of GDP in a post-war period. During such times, even though the labour force declined, the population grew at an average annual rate of 2% per year, despite a constant population growth. For the post-war period between 1970 and 1989, this means that, by the fall of 1980, the workforce had grown by 2%, the population had grown by 9%, the labour force had grown by 4%, and, at the end of 1989, the labour force had also grown by 5%. [10] Since both the growth and labour force are dependent at the moment, the more educated they are, the more likely they are to rise to the top; of course education increases economic growth because it increases educational quality.[11] Indeed, although there have been two major decades of declines in the economy—from the early 1990s to 2003—the main cause of this was that universities were not allowed anywhere near enough to support the educational output of the state.[12] Thus, the only way of increasing the educational level of many people is at the point of full employment. But that approach can only proceed only if the state is willing to share the labour capital with the public which also has the means for higher education.[13] As a result, it is clear that education has some deleterious effects on the labour market. In particular, because the public is the principal producer of higher education, it controls the demand for that higher ed education. This prevents the private sector in general from finding ways to create jobs, particularly when the labour force declines.[14] Secondly, if the state is unwilling to share the labor force with the public, the state leads to higher levels of unemployment, lower economic growth, and higher wages. In the UK, this situation is particularly acute when the economic situation is worsened. In 2003, the Government under Lord Lawson received a special report from the Department for Education into the way in which students could be sent off to college—a policy that led to high employment. Yet, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) under Sir Paul Nurse, concluded that the rise in unemployment had been due to an increase in the number of schools in the city.[15] Moreover, the rise had been due to increases in student numbers.[16] Indeed, in the same year, the average weekly student has grown by 6%, while the percentage of students without a certificate has jumped by 6%. The rise in the number of students was so great that the number of pupils admitted to secondary schools has almost halved from 26,