• Proceedings of the Population Association of Korea Conference
• /
• 2006.12a
• /
• pp.113-128
• /
• 2006

The main theme of this paper was to investigate the role of education as a source of economic growth in Korea. In this study, first, the objective mode was built by extending neoclassical Solow growth theory. Second, the capital deepening typical of an endogenous economic per-capita growth model was developed empirically for seven East-Asian economies as for the medium term, during $1975{\sim}2004$. And then we found the meaning of coefficients of growth factors, direct relative contribution of each input to per-capita growth in seven East-Asian countries, relative indirect contribution of education to per-capita growth in Korea, accounting for difference due to accumulation in Korea. The indirect relative contributions of secondary and higher education and R&D to per-capita growth change the results somewhat. Secondary education is still the largest single contributor 83.6 percent of predicted growth is due to secondary school enrollment in Korea. Primary education comes second with 37.5 percent and followed by higher education at -52.9 percent. Physical investment gives 62.3 percent and unimproved raw labor contributes only -1.4 percent.