Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which Latin American countries consistently perform at the bottom. In growth models estimated across world regions, these low levels of cognitive skills can account for the poor growth performance of Latin America. Given the limitations of worldwide tests in discriminating performance at low levels, we also introduce measures from two regional tests designed to measure performance for all Latin American countries with internationally comparable income data. Our growth analysis using these data confirms the significant effects of cognitive skills on intra-regional variations. Splicing the new regional tests into the worldwide tests, we also confirm this effect in extended worldwide regressions, although it appears somewhat smaller in the regional Latin American data than in the worldwide data.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by CESifo Group Munich in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number
CESifo Working Paper No. 2667.
Find related papers by JEL classification: I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General O40 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - General
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Benhabib, Jess & Spiegel, Mark M., 2005.
"Human Capital and Technology Diffusion,"
Handbook of Economic Growth,
in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 13, pages 935-966
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Hanushek, Eric A., 2002.
"Publicly provided education,"
Handbook of Public Economics,
in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 30, pages 2045-2141
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions: