School Quality, Educational Inequality and Economic Growth

Abstract

Realizing the importance of education in developing a country, many governments had begun to pay more attention in improving the education quality in their country. However whether the desired level of education quality is equally distributed is still debated on. On top of that, current literature on which level of education, either basic or tertiary education, brings greater return to the society is still inconclusive. It is not the objective of this paper to answer or add on the debate. On the other hand this paper would like to explore the relationship between school quality, namely at primary education and secondary education, and economic growth. Educational inequality at primary and secondary education would be measured with using the concept of education Gini. Using GDP as the dependent variable and regressing it with Gini coefficient of primary education and secondary education, would be able to show which level of education inequality is significant in explaining the economic growth of a country. Using Malaysian data, for the last 20 years, the relationship between education inequality of different level of education and the economic growth would be postulated.

Identification of Measurement Variables for Understanding Vulnerability to Education Inequality in Developing Countries: A Conceptual Article

“…Nevertheless, the universality access does not solve the entire issue of inequality in education distribution. Besides the institutional distribution and enrolment (S. R. Lucas, 2001;Maas & Criel, 1982), others examined differences in education based on educational attainment (Thomas et al, 2001), school quality (R. Rao & Jani, 2008), educational finance (Ter Weele, 1976), and dropout (Gamoran, 2015). Regarding inequality using dropout, Gamoran (2015) argued that inequality exists when certain individual or the "disadvantaged families leave school earlier, receive fewer degrees and certificates, and exhibit lower academic skills than their more privileged peers" (p. 1).…”