Higher educational enrollment, school teachers and GDP in Nepal: a causality analysis

Abstract

Education-centered human capital theory acknowledges the role of education in the economic development of nations. With the emergence of endogenous growth theories in the 1980s one of the variables very extensively included in cross?country and country-specific empirical growth studies is education measured by enrollment in primary, secondary and higher level of education, average years of schooling and literacy rate. The aim of this paper is to investigate empirically the linkage between higher education and real gross domestic product of Nepal. This paper employs time series data on enrollment in higher education and teachers working in the lower secondary and secondary schools and gross domestic product of Nepal spanning the period 1975-2009 and investigates the causality in Granger’s sense employing unit root and cointegration test tools. Evidence is in favour of causality running from real gross domestic product to enrollment in higher education but the causality relation between real gross domestic product and school teachers seems neutral.Key words: Enrollment in higher education; Teachers in lower secondary and secondary schools; Real GDP; Unit root; Cointegration; Granger causality; NepalEconomic Journal of Development IssuesVol. 11 & 12 No. 1-2 (2010) Combined IssuePage: 69-91Uploaded date: 10 April, 2012