La educación como motor de la transformación productiva de los países

Abstract

This study investigates the impacts of education, measured by quantity and quality, divided by socio-economic level, on economic complexity represented by the Economic Complexity Index, employing years of schooling as quantity proxy and a database of learning metrics associated with knowledge and human capital skills for 165 countries taken from international tests as quality proxy, which refer to a theory developed by Hidalgo & Hausmann (2009) through a panel data estimation with fixed effects. Our estimations show that the education effect on the economic complexity of a country varies according to their income level. In the first place, educational quality and quantity have a significant positive impact on the economic complexity of high-income countries, while the results for low-income counties are not conclusive because different educational proxies lead to different outcomes. Therefore, three hypothesis were raised to explain the results: i) “Brain drain”, happens when skilled workers perceived low productivities and weak governances in their country and decide to emigrate to developed countries, resulting in the loss of ideas and capacities for the home country; ii) problems with the measurement of quality data, since the database has a limited number of periods that inhibit the establishment of lags greater than eight years and iii) the difference in the measurement of the same competencies in international tests, which lead to poorly correlated results between them.