Research publications and economic growth: evidence from cross-country regressions

Abstract

The effects of the quality of tertiary education on economic growth have been examined across countries. Professors’ research publication is used as a proxy for the quality of education at the university level. Research outputs in basic science and engineering are found to have a positive and significant effect on economic growth. Economics and business research also have immediate growth effects although the effects are a bit smaller. The results are, in general, consistent with the findings in the growth literature. The convergence hypothesis is also supported by the data.

Keywords:

• research publications
• economic growth
• schooling

JEL Classification::

• O40
• C20

Notes

¹ One more concern over our model specification is a reverse causality from economic growth to research publications, and hence a simple linear regression model has been estimated

 The insignificant parameter estimate together with a small R ² suggests that the likelihood of the reverse causality from growth to publications be negligible. Some control variables such as research funds, openness of universities and salary of professors could be included. It will also be desirable to study more rigorous estimates of Granger causality using time-series data. These are left for further study.

² When the world economics ranking conducted by Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003) was used to measure the quality of economics education, the growth effect was also found to be positive and significant (t-value = 2.10). However, the data were available only for top-200 universities worldwide, and hence the ranking did not sufficiently reflect the publications of Asian universities that appeared, in most cases, below the rank 200th. Coupe's (2003) citation rank included only 19 countries, and thus the degrees of freedom problem could not be avoided. To reduce these potential problems, Jin's (2006) world ranking that includes economics publications for 46 countries is employed here.