The Contribution of Education to Economic Growth: Empirical Analysis in the Middle East and North Africa Region

Human capital can be divided into two sectors; education and training. In this paper we will focus on education. Since the early'90s, the empirical literature on human capital and economic growth is full of conflicting results. Indeed, most theoretical analyzes have confirmed that human capital has a positive and significant effect on growth. The paper aims to examine in time series the causality between human capital and growth in countries of MENA region during the period 1960-2011. For this, We carry out our empirical investigation by employing various human capital measures suggested in the literature, than we use cointegration techniques and Granger causality tests. The results show that cointegration between education and economic growth exists only in Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco, Iran and Israel. However, in the other countries the causality does not exist because they don't have effective means (human capital) to improve their growth.