Colombian economy to moderate after impressive rebound

Significance The OECD similarly raised its forecast for Colombia this month to 9.5%, from 7.6% previously. The optimism follows impressive growth of 17.6% and 13.2% year-on-year in the second and third quarters, according to national statistics agency DANE, as the economy emerges from the paralysis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Impacts The banking sector has proven resilient during the pandemic; solvency risks will remain low and no recapitalisation needs are expected. Additional social, health and education spending will be needed to reverse a sharp increase in the poverty rate, now 43%. Security problems will continue to threaten Colombia’s social and economic development. Congress will remain fragmented after the March legislative elections, making consensus-building crucial to the passing of legislation.

School Financing in Jamaica: An Exploration of the Allocation of School Resources

Education spending has increased significantly in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last few decades and Jamaica is no exception. The country has prioritized education within its policy agenda, with spending consistently above the regions average for more than 10 years. Despite these efforts, closing existing learning gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students has remained a challenge. This study examines how resources are allocated to Jamaican schools and explores ways to promote equity through adjustments in education spending. Findings suggest that lower socio-economic schools rely mainly on public funds, while most high socio-economic schools income comes from donations from different sources, which can be used more flexibly. Such contributions are not always quantifiable or consistently described in the MOEYIs registries, which distorts the equitable allocation of public resources. Moreover, the funding formula used by the MOEYI is relatively new and no impact evaluation studies have been carried out to measure if it effectively responds to equitable education opportunities across schools. More information on schools access to and sources of resources would allow the MOEYI to determine more accurately whether the funds allocated to each school are sufficient to meet their real needs.

Effets des dépenses publiques d’éducation, la fiscalité et la corruption sur la croissance économique en Afrique de l’ouest : une analyse empirique sur données de panel

Dans cette étude, nous examinons empiriquement les effets des dépenses publiques d’éducation, la fiscalité et la corruption sur la croissance économique par habitant à long terme à partir de modèles économétriques des données de panel de 10 pays d’Afrique de l’ouest sur la période 2004-2020. D’abord, nos résultats montrent qu’il existe une relation positive et significative entre les dépenses publiques d’éducation retardées de 5 ans et la croissance économique par habitant. En effet, une augmentation de 1% des dépenses publiques d’éducation entraînerait une hausse moyenne de 0,42% du taux de croissance économique. Tous les gouvernements de l’Afrique occidentale veulent atteindre les objectifs de l’éducation pour tous. Cette extension ne pourrait pas se réaliser sans une augmentation des dépenses publiques. Parallèlement, suivant l’approche de l’équivalence ricardienne, les sources de financement de l’éducation, telles que les impôts et les dettes publiques, agissent négativement sur la croissance économique. Ensuite, la corruption, en affectant significativement la croissance économique, entraîne des pertes importantes de recettes fiscales. Ce qui gangrène l’efficacité des efforts de financement des politiques publiques d’éducation. Enfin, dans le cadre scolaire global, seul le taux de scolarisation aux études supérieures exerce un effet réellement significatif sur la croissance à long terme. Ce résultat est d’une grande portée, car la forte tertiarisation des économies de ces pays est accompagnée d’un secteur informel occupant une place très importante et marginalement pris en compte dans le calcul du PIB. In this study, we empirically examine the effects of public education spending, taxation and corruption on long-term per capita economic growth using econometric models of panel data from 10 West African countries on the period 2004-2020. First, our results show that there is a positive and significant relationship between public education spending delayed by 5 years and per capita economic growth. Indeed, a 1% increase in public education spending would lead to an average 0.42% increase in the rate of economic growth. All governments in West Africa want to achieve education for all goals. This extension could not be achieved without an increase in public spending. At the same time, following the Ricardian equivalence approach, the sources of financing of education, such as taxes and public debt, act negatively on economic growth. Second, corruption, by significantly affecting economic growth, leads to significant losses in tax revenue. This undermines the effectiveness of efforts to fund public education policies. Finally, within the overall educational framework, only the rate of enrollment in higher education has a truly significant effect on long-term growth. This result is farreaching, because the strong tertiarization of the economies of these countries is accompanied by an informal sector occupying a very important place and marginally taken into account in the calculation of the GDP.

Education

The analysis of the political and institutional connections between education and other parts of the welfare state is an expanding field of scholarship. The chapter starts by discussing the complex relationship between education and socio-economic inequality from a comparative and historical perspective. Discussing the variety of education regimes with a focus on OECD countries, the chapter goes on to highlight differences in the relative importance of education as part of more encompassing welfare state regimes. Furthermore, the chapter identifies different education regimes characterized by features such as levels of spending, the distribution between public and private education spending, the importance of vocational relative to academic education, and institutional stratification in secondary education. These education regimes correspond to a significant extent with established welfare state regime typologies. The final section of the chapter discusses factors that might explain the emergence of distinct and different educational regimes, such as historical legacies, religious heritage, and the balance of power between organized interests and political parties, as well as political institutions.

Impact of CO2 emissions on GDP per capita, FDI, forest area and government spending on education in Indonesia 1991-2020: The GMM methods

The economy is considered an efficient way to materialize, but the relationship between CO2 emissions and economic growth has not been systematically explained. In this study, we will build a model that formalizes the interaction between CO2 emissions and GDP per Capita, FDI, Forest Area and Government Spending on Education used to revisit the trade-off between economic growth and the environment or a green economy. The model captures an essential feature of the continuous innovation process, which is path dependencies. First, this research will create a data analysis using the System GMM Estimation. Second, we will evaluate GDP per Capita, FDI, Forest Area and Government Spending on Education spending on green growth. The results of this study are expected to be a government policy to increase green economic growth.

The Teacher Uprising, 2010–2021

When Chicago teachers went on strike in 2012, they highlighted an emergent militance among teachers in the United States. Led by the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) in the 2010s sought to use the collective bargaining process not only to fight for better salaries and working conditions, but also to dramatically improve the lives of their students through racial justice initiatives and more services such as school nurses and social workers. Other big city unions, some in dialogue with the CTU through the United Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE), embarked on similar campaigns. Elsewhere, teachers staged state-wide walkouts. In February 2018, teachers in all of West Virginia’s fifty-five counties went on strike to protest stagnant pay and escalating healthcare costs. Their efforts, which forced a Republican legislature to substantially increase education spending, inspired similar red-state walkouts in the months that followed. Strikes in Oklahoma and Arizona also won major funding hikes, for example. Then, in early 2019, militant teachers walked out in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Denver, and in the fall, the CTU was on strike again, this time with even broader demands than in 2012. Another year of militance might have occurred in 2020, but the global COVID-19 pandemic forced school districts and unions to focus on the immediate public health crisis. Unions pivoted to demanding that districts maintain protocols to ensure teachers, students, and their families were kept safe from the virus.

Do Macroeconomic Factors Defy the Expected Relationship with FDI Inflows in a Developing Country? An Econometric Analysis Based on Bangladesh

Through econometric analysis, this study investigates the effects of various economic factors on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in Bangladesh from 1980 to 2019. ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) has been used to estimate the economic determinants of FDI inflows in Bangladesh after removing the trends from the independent variables. Empirical results revealed that GDP, Fixed Telephone Subscribers, Inflation Rate, and Education Spending are the eminent economic determinants of FDI. Subsequently, a Granger causality test and Vector Auto Regression (VAR) confirmed the absence of any long-term impact of these variables on FDI. From the analysis, it is evident that the ADF (Augmented Dickey-Fuller) test is necessary to remove the trend from these variables and corner those variables for the ARDL method to find the significant ones that have substantial impacts on FDI in Bangladesh. GDP, Fixed Telephone Subscribers, Inflation Rate, and Education Spending are found to be statistically significant while all of them having a positive impact on the FDI. Even though this study matches with many other previous studies conducted by researchers, some exciting findings contradict the expected result and open new doors for further research.

Impact of Public Debt on Health and Education in SAARC Countries

The present study has done to investigate the impact of external debt servicing on health and education spending for the panel of selected SAARC countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) are basically developing countries of Asia. This study uses two models of education spending and the other is for health spending by using the data set for 1990-2016 and estimations are carried out by using fixed effect model. Beside other explanatory variables debt servicing is the most important determinant of education spending and health spending and confirm the literature view that high external debt leads to increase in debt servicing liabilities and government do repayment of debt servicing by cutting its expenditure especially on health and education spending as it is easy for government to cut down the social sector spending rather than other sector spending. Other variable Tax revenue and Gross Capital Formation also effect the health and education spending but debt servicing liability effect more. It is best for SAARC countries to use and organize their own resources efficiently and less dependence on external debt and on foreign borrowing and give high attention to education and health spending.

Women’s Suffrage and Children’s Education

While a growing literature shows that women, relative to men, prefer greater investment in children, it is unclear whether empowering women produces better economic outcomes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in US suffrage laws, we show that exposure to suffrage during childhood led to large increases in educational attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially Blacks and Southern Whites. We also find that suffrage led to higher earnings alongside education gains, although not for Southern Blacks. Using newly digitized data, we show that education increases are primarily explained by suffrage-induced growth in education spending, although early-life health improvements may have also contributed. (JEL H75, I21, I22, J13, J15, J16, N32)