with John Beirne
Published in Economics of Transition, 15 (1): 57-76, January 2007 ( PDF )
Conventional wisdom suggests that the stocks of human capital were one
of the few positive
legacies from communism. However, if factories under communism were so
inefficient, why would
the education system not have been? Using the education production function
approach and new data
on educational inputs and outcomes from 1960 to 1989, we find evidence
suggesting that the official
human capital stocks figures were “over-estimated” during the communist
period. In other words, we
find that the official human capital stock numbers are significantly higher
than those predicted not only
in relation to countries at similar levels of development, but also on
the basis of comparable (in efficiency
terms) educational systems.
Working paper version IZA DP 2502
Data set
Data