The Empirical Analysis On The Relationship Between Economic Growth And Development Of Higher Education In China

Economy and education are two foundations for the development of modern society, and the research on their relationship is an important field in educational economics. As the highest grade of education, the higher education is highlighted upon its relation to economic growth, especially when it enlarged the enrollment. The researches done adopted the static methods to find the relationship between them. Differentiating with the past research, this paper will see the economic growth and the higher education as dynamic system respectively so that it is reasonable to adopt the dynamic method in the related research. By the guide of theory of human capital and of new economic growth, this paper will adopt the dynamic econometric model to research for the real relationship between the two, which is on the basis of data of time series from 1978 to 2003. Eventually, it will come up with the corresponding advices derived from the research conclusions. Basically, the contents of this paper are organized as follows: Firstly, it is interpreted that the technical identifications of higher education and economic growth and the relative theories such as human capital and new economic growth, which can make theatric basis for the further empirical study. After that, the paper is to construct a couple of index systems to depict higher education development and economic growth respectively. At the end of this paper, it will adopt the dynamic econometric models such as Granger causality test, co-integration test, VAR and VECM model, to evaluate the co-relations between the two systems. According to the empirical study, the paper comes to the conclusions as follows: (1) There really exists one-way causality between the economic growth and the higher education, i.e. the former can promote the latter but the latter can't change the former. However, this study also shows that increasing the development of higher education can make more contributions to the economic growth. (2) There really exists such dynamic co-integration relationship as either long-run equilibrium economic relationship or short-run wave motion one.