分布增长核算: 教育与全球贫困的减少, 1980–2019
Distributional Growth Accounting: Education and the Reduction of Global Poverty, 1980–2019
Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025 · [{"name": "Amory Gethin", "affiliation": ["World Bank Group"]}]
中文摘要
摘要 本文量化了教育在减少全球贫困中所发挥的作用。我提出了一套工具, 用于识别学校教育对不同收入群体经济增长的贡献, 并将技能群体之间的不完全替代纳入宏观经济增长分解。我利用一个几乎代表全球全部人口的新微观数据库、关于学校教育私人回报的新估计以及历史收入分配统计数据, 将这一"分布式增长核算"框架应用于数据。1980年至2019年间, 教育可以解释全球经济增长的约45%, 以及全球最贫困20%人口税前收入增长的60%。这些收益中有相当一部分得益于技能偏向型技术变革放大了教育回报。由于忽视了学校教育的分布效应, 标准增长核算方法大幅低估了教育对全球贫困人口的经济收益。
Abstract
Abstract This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into a macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor.