Page 70 - Education for Development:George Psacharopoulos University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
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                  are formulated based on hunch, intuition or political expediency. They are

                  seldom based on research findings whether a particular policy would work or
                  not. Even when there is consensus in the literature that a given policy works,
                  politicians may ignore it if enacting it means they lose votes in the next election.

                       Typical example of this, is charging tuition in public universities. Providing
                  free education for all at all levels sounds great to the people and generates
                  votes, even if it is impossible to enact it in practice, let alone inequitable of

                  charging the same price (zero) to rich and poor students. Budgetary allocations
                  for education as a whole, and distribution to the various levels and types
                  of education are governed by inertia from year-to-year, perhaps adjusted
                  for inflation. There is no reallocation of resources away from inefficient or

                  inequitable activities toward better ones.
                       In the next section, we review the evidence on which policies could be

                  based.


                                         Research Evidence



                       Traditionally, education was in the hands of pedagogues, psychologists and
                  sociologists. In the last 60 years or so, however, economists play a dominant

                  role in identifying effective education policies. According to human capital
                  theory, formulated in the early 1960s, education is a form of investment creating
                  human capital that is subject to analyses similar to that for physical capital
                  (Schultz, 1961; Becker, 1964). For example, providing education involves a cost

                  in terms of resources that can be compared to the benefits of education. Based
                  on this theory, education policy could give priority to the expansion of those

                  levels or types of education that exhibit the highest profitability.
                       Initially, research focused on the link between education and labor market
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