The impact of state regulation in a sphere of education on sustainable development of national economy

Abstract

Education is a core element of the Sustainable Development Concept. It is not only because of the declaration of SDG 4 within the 2030 Agenda but also its embeddedness in other goals, targets, and indicators. Thus, the study aims to generalize approaches to define the relationship between the efficiency of the strategy of sustainable development of the national economy and state regulation of education. The research is accomplished for 14 Central and Eastern European countries (2006–2016) using the combination of principal components method and parametric method of stochastic frontier analysis in the software package STATA 11 and FRONTIER 4.1. As a result, the empirical proofs of the strong and adequate link between the efficiency of the sustainable development strategy of the national economy and state regulation of education are identified. The technical efficiency indexes were also calculated that allowed forming three clusters for Central and Eastern European countries distributed by the level of state regulation of education and efficiency of sustainable development strategy implementation. It helps to distinguish the main measures to reform the state regulation of education in Ukraine considering the experience of Slovenia, Poland, the Czech Republic, countries that proved to be the leaders in a sphere of sustainable development strategy implementation. The recommendations for further improvements in educational policies were defined. For instance, effective and sustainable state regulation of education should focus on decentralizing education, developing private-public partnerships, stimulating adult education development, etc. Acknowledgment and fundingThis research was funded by the grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine “Reforming the lifelong learning system in Ukraine for the prevention of the labor emigration: a coopetition model of institutional partnership” (No. 0120U102001).