On the relationship between university education and economic growth: the role of professors' publication

This paper examines the effect of university education on economic growth across 34 developed countries. Professors' research output is used as a proxy for the quality of education at the university level. To allow for some degree of difficulties in learning English across countries, an English weight has been constructed. We found that disparities in English proficiency across countries no longer matter in academic publications. The research outputs in science and engineering appear to have a positive and significant effect on economic growth. Economics and business researches also have immediate growth effects, although these effects are a bit smaller. The results are, in general, consistent with the findings of Aghion et al. (2005) and Vandenbussche et al. (2006), although their quality measure of tertiary education is different from the one used here.