I had been looking at some education data, when just by chance, Clive Crook led me to new study, The Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy, by Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Pretty graph, which I re-reproduce here.
Source [pdf]
Loose thoughts:
- Since the quality of (tertiary) education varies from country to country, static comparisons across countries might not be altogether that revealing.
- And this graph does not reveal by itself when differences are statistically significant, so perhaps some within-country comparisons are not what they seem to be.
- But having said that, within-country, unless you get (from top to bottom) a triangle, followed by a little black square, a black dot, and then a big, gray square, that country is likely headed for a productivity growth slowdown, conditional on education quality within that country and a level of impact of human capital on productivity. (34 years old is old enough to rule out the "they just take longer to get a college degree there" argument.) Germany seems particularly troublesome, although their restricted university/ widespread on-the-job training system of higher education might explain some of this inversion in a more optimistic way.
- Within-country and given that desirable order of symbols, a greater spread suggests good prospects of human-capital driven growth. Korea, in particular, might be a happening place to watch.
- Is the US headed for productivity-growth stagnation? (See here and here.) So let those H1B visas flow like rivers of honey! (And I'm being selfless here: having one already, restrictions are what's in my narrow, myopic self-interest.)
- Peruvians have reasons to feel within-country hopeful.
2 comments:
Productivity is not necessarily tied to tertiary education, though. For example, if you are a country that needs factory workers, a secondary (or even primary) education may be all you need. It does concern me that the U.S. has stopped providing an education for anyone not going to college -- which may explain the 12 million students who drop out of high school annually.
Troy,
Thanks for your comment. It is very true. If I felt the compulsive need to "defend" myself, I'd say that I *was* talking about the kind of productivity nad countries) that requires workers with tertiary education, but nah: you unquestionably make an excellent point.
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