tailieunhanh - Education and Economic Growth

For these firms, willingness to expand--and, in particular, to add permanent employees--depends primarily on expected increases in demand for their products, not on financing costs. Bank-dependent smaller firms, by contrast, have faced significantly greater problems obtaining credit, according to surveys and anecdotes. The Federal Reserve, together with other regulators, has been engaged in significant efforts to improve the credit environment for small businesses. For example, through the provision of specific guidance and extensive examiner training, we are working to help banks strike a good balance between appropriate prudence and reasonable willingness to make loans to creditworthy borrowers | Education and Economic Growth Robert J. Barro1 Since the late 1980s much of the attention of macroeconomists has focused on long-term issues notably the effects of government policies on the long-term rate of economic growth. This emphasis reflects the recognition that the difference between prosperity and poverty for a country depends on how fast it grows over the long term. Although standard macroeconomic policies are important for growth other aspects of policy broadly interpreted to encompass all government activities that matter for economic performance are even more significant. This paper focuses on human capital as a determinant of economic growth. Although human capital includes education health and aspects of social capital the main focus of the present study is on education. The analysis stresses the distinction between the quantity of education measured by years of attainment at various levels and the quality gauged by scores on internationally comparable examinations. The recognition that the determinants of long-term economic growth were the central macroeconomic problem was fortunately accompanied in the late 1980s by important advances in the theory of economic growth. This period featured the development of endogenous-growth models in which the long-term rate of growth was determined within the model. A key feature of these models is a theory of technological progress viewed as a process whereby purposeful research and application lead over time 1 Harvard University. This research has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation. I to new and better products and methods of production and to the adoption of superior technologies that were developed in other countries or sectors. One major contributor in this area is Romer 1990 . Shortly thereafter in the early 1990s there was a good deal of empirical estimation of growth models using cross-country and cross-regional data. This empirical work was in some sense inspired by the excitement