Economic Implications of Education in Southeast Europe

Abstract

This research covers an evaluation of the impact of education system, educational, scientific and other institutions on the economic growth in nine countries of Southeast Europe (SEE). The main hypothesis is the following: GDP pc growth is significant and positively correlates with the indicators of the state of education system. In addition to educational institutions, there are other social and economic indicators on which education and science depend, namely the budget and fiscal system, corruption and protection of intellectual property rights, which also have positive and significant impact on GDP pc. The stated fields are interactive. Besides GDP pc, the analysis includes another 11 variables. Factor analysis for the variables grouped into two factors shows high significance. The F-test result shows significance of the regression model. ANOVA test, too, confirms the aforementioned significance. Both variables (the first and second factor) have positive direction with GDP pc. The results show significance of the institutional-educational variable, while the impact of educational population in the model is not sufficiently significant. Econometric analysis has mainly confirmed the initial hypotheses.

Untitled

“…Their results suggest that elements of science and the quality of higher education greatly affect the size of GDP per capita in the studied countries. Similar research was carried out in South-Eastern Europe by Popović et al (2020). The authors focused on assessing the impact of the education system, educational, scientific, and other institutions on economic growth in nine countries of South-Eastern Europe (SEE) and concluded that indicators of the state of educational and other institutions are positively correlated with GDP per capita growth.…”