Education and Economic Growth: an Empirical Analysis of Interdependencies and Impacts Based on Panel Data

The paper focuses particularly on proving that education can lead to economic growth within five groups of EU Member States. Our study reviews the human capital from its quantitative (years of study) and qualitative (education quality) dimensions, the empirical panel data analysis being based on three double-log models developed and processed through random and fixed effects. The main explanatory variables comprise the GDP per capita, the physical capital, the average number of years of schooling (for all three levels, especially tertiary education), the quality of education measured through scores on skill tests, the degree of international openness, life expectancy and inflation rate. Our results highlight that education is extremely important in positively influencing economic growth. Within this framework, the results emphasize that within the European Union there is a strong positive influence of education on economic growth, expressed mainly through an increase in GDP per capita growth rate, especially when the human capital is expressed by qualitative variables, while the quantitative variable’s importance is being greatly reduced.