Long-Run and Short-Run Relationships Between Education and Economic Growth: The Malaysian Experience

Abstract

This paper investigates the long and short-run relationships between human capital, measured in terms of average years of schooling for people aged 15 years and older, and economic growth in Malaysia between 1970 and 2009. The data was collected from various sources, including the World Bank database, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and scholarly texts. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) test was utilized to examine the relationships between education and economic growth. The results of the co-integration test revealed that economic growth was absolutely exogenous and the remaining variables were endogenous in Malaysia. This fi nding suggests that the status of these variables depend on the level of economic growth, while the opposite is not true. The most interesting results were that the long-run forcing variables for human capital accumulation were capital stock, employment and economic growth. However, the causality test revealed that economic growth, employment and capital stock, not only aff ects human capital in the short-run, but in the long run as well. The causality tests performed detected two-way relationships between human capital and capital stock, and employment separately in the long run. Although economic growth is exogenous, Malaysia should still continue to invest in its human capital accumulation since it could att ract more investments and subsequently create employment opportunities within the economy.   Keywords: Education levels, education development, income, economic growth.