Summary
The paper focuses on Nigeria, which has over the years invested substantially to improve the educational attainment of the labor force and to raise productivity but yet still faces declining real output and slow economic growth. The study observes that this puzzle is attributable to labor market distortions, redundancy of the workforce, benefit captured syndrome, industrial dispute and job discontinuities as well as leakages in the Nigerian society such as brain drain, among others. The paper further suggests the improvement of the education system, appropriate pricing of teachers labor and prevention of industrial disputes in order to upgrade and internalize the contributions of educational capital to economic growth in Nigeria.
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Extract
A Dynamic Analysis of Education and Economic Growth in Nigeria
INTRODUCTION
It is widely accepted that education1 creates improved citizens and helps to upgrade the general standard of living in a society. Therefore, positive social change is likely to be associated with the production of qualitative citizenry. It would seem to follow naturally that if more individuals are educated, the wealth of nation would rise, since more education attracts higher wages and aggregatively higher national income. And if there are positive externalities of education, national income should increase by even more than the sum of the individual benefits. This increasing faith in education as an agent of change in many developing countries including Nigeria has led to a heavy investment in it, and thus the delegation of manpower development to the schools. The pressure for higher education and even school education in many developing countries has undoubtedly been helped by public perception of financial reward from pursuing such education. Generally, this goes with the belief that expanding education promotes economic growth.But however, the paradox accompanying this belief is that, despite the huge investment in education, there exist no strong evidence of growth-promoting externalities of education in Nigeria, but rather, education expansion further deepens social inequality and inculcate negative social changes such as cultism, rent seeking, sexual harassment, sorting, result racketeering, industrial disputes, brain drain among other social vices in the Nigerian school system and the society at large.The puzzle is - why has Nigeria that had invested substantially in education over the years be facing declining real income and sluggish economic growth rate? And another pertinent question to ask is - when education does not lead to an expansion of productive capacity, can a poor developing country like Nigeria afford the luxury of an educational extravaganza? In any case the resources devoted to education represent a cost to the society not only because they are economic resources but also because they have alternative uses. Therefore, if economic growth lags behind because of increments in the educational budget, this becomes an area where growth theory and empirical evidence need to be reconsidered.The need for the study, therefore, arises from the fact that there tends to be a severe socio-political pressure to expand education in developing countries, but th...See the full content of this document
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