Effect of equity in education on the quality of economic growth: evidence from China

Abstract

In China, there is a general view that the educational equity has a negative effect on the quality of economic growth. Acting upon this viewpoint, China's education policy has gradually abandoned its low-gravity development strategies and would rather significantly invest more money into higher education than basic education. In this paper, an empirical study on the relationship between China’s educational equity and the quality of economic growth is implemented to try to answer the following question, i.e., which is the more important one for the equality of China's economic growth, basic education, or higher education. By adopting China's recent 27-year macro-economic data from 1978 to 2004, the paper carries out the Granger causality test between the equity in education and the quality of economic growth and then establishes a regression model. Results of the empirical study show that the education equity is significantly related to the quality of economic growth, and the educational equity is the Granger reason of China’s economic growth quality. That is to say, besides promoting the social harmony, educational equity also has a positive role in promoting the quality of economic growth in China, which is a very different conclusion from the current point of view. Based on the results and the analysis of the mechanism of the relationship between educational equity and the quality of economic growth, this paper proposes that China's present education policies need many adjustments.