THE IMPORTANCE OF HIGHER EDUCATION ON ECONOMIC GROWTH

Abstract

It is very important for countries to stimulate their economic prosperity and reduce poverty. While it is commonly accepted that education of all forms enhances economic performance of a country, yet the question of which level of education, secondary or tertiary, is more important to fuel the economy is not conclusively answered. The finding in Avraham Cohen’s PhD thesis is that education, as measured by published research, is strongly associated with Artificial Intelligence index of countries. Also, he found that AI is strongly associated with GDP. His findings encourage the idea that higher education, which is needed for Artificial Intelligence (AI), will be a dominant factor for economic growth in general; hereby, policy makers should invest in higher education to ensure economic affluence. Enrollment rates for higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa are by far the lowest in the world and the academic research output in the region is among the world’s lowest. Because of a belief that primary and secondary schooling are more important than tertiary education for poverty reduction, the international development community has encouraged African governments’ relative neglect of higher education. Using methodology of fuzzy logic-based soft regression, this study challenges these beliefs and demonstrates that economic growth is almost exclusively determined by higher education. Also, the importance of higher education relative to secondary education is more so in recent years relative to a decade or two ago. Motivated by this finding, I propose to find the right branch of higher education for every country based on its economic competitive advantage that will impact its economic growth best.