Educational Expansion and Earnings Differentials in Greece
| Autor: | Haris Lambropoulos, George Psacharopoulos |
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| Rok vydání: | 1992 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Comparative Education Review. 36:52-70 |
| ISSN: | 1545-701X 0010-4086 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/447081 |
| Popis: | It has been amply demonstrated that investment in human capital is one of the prime, if not sine qua non, means by which a country develops and sustains economic growth.' The foundation of the link between education and economic development is human capital theory: education is a form of investment that yields "high" private and social returns. However, the more advanced the stage of a country's development and the higher the level of education considered, the more likely and plausible it is that the above proposition will be challenged.2 If education is in fact an investment, then it should be subject to the law of diminishing returns. Or, there might come a point where the returns have fallen below the opportunity cost of capital (for the private investor or the state), and therefore further investment in education might not be justifiable. Greece is a country in which educational expansion has been spectacular in the post-World War II period and, therefore, is a fertile ground for investigating the above contentions. In spite of rapid educational expansion, Greece is also an outlier in terms of the number of students studying abroad and, in general, the demand for higher education.' To what extent have the returns to education fallen during the period of expansion? What drives the demand for higher education, for domestic study, or for study abroad? What is the role of the public sector as a dominant employer of highly educated labor? What implications can be drawn regarding future educational investment priorities in the country? In this article, we document the changing profile of educational attainment of the population and the labor force in Greece and examine the extent to which educational expansion has led to wage compression in the economy. We also present estimates of rates of return to investment in different levels of schooling using data from a variety of data sets from 1960 to 1987. Contrasting these with data on the demand for higher education in Greece, we attempt to provide an explanation of the apparent puzzle of a strong demand for higher education coinciding with low |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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