From Education to World Development with Professor Eric Hanushek
Stanford Senior Fellow Eric Hanushek joined SCCEI for a conversation on his research looking at the worldwide progress of achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Hanushek compares different countries' PISA scores and incomes in effort to answer the following questions: Who is competitive? How do labor skills affect development? How skilled is China?
Ensuring that every child in the world achieves basic skills is a key development goal emphasized in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. But how far is the world away from reaching this goal? And what would achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 mean for world development? Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, joins Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University, for a discussion on the development of an achievement database for all of the countries of the world along with estimation of the economic gains from educational improvement.
Hanushek bases his talk on the underlying concept that economic growth is almost solely a function of the skills of a workforce, which is in turn measured by the achievement and knowledge the workers have. Hanushek compares PISA scores across the world with each country's respective income level, and sets out to answer three main questions: 1) Who is competitive? 2) How do labor skills affect development? And, 3) how skilled is China?
Watch the full event recording to discover the answers from Hanushek's research findings: