The Role of Education on Economic Growth: Evidence from Turkey

This paper examines the short- and long-term impacts of education on Turkey's economic growth between 1990 and 2018 through two dimensions: Human capital (labour productivity) and innovative capacity. The study draws attention to the quantitative aspects of education showing how employees with different stages (primary, secondary, and tertiary) of education contribute to labour productivity and technological developments in the country. Besides, it also attaches great significance to the qualitative aspects of education which have been largely ignored in the literature. Using the autoregressive distributed lag co-integration technique, the study finds statistically significant short- and long-run impacts running from fractions of employees with maximum secondary and tertiary education qualifications to output growth. It reveals that tertiary education has three-fold long-run impact on economic growth compared to secondary education. The study documents significant long-run impacts of PISA, students per classroom, and students per teacher on economic growth; however, they fail to generate statistically significant impacts on economic growth in the short-run. Thus, the study concludes that intangible values of education can take a longer time to generate tangible outcomes on the economy and the model converges to its long-run equilibrium at a speed of 12%.