ArmInfo. Experts at Stanford University and Munich University have assessed the economic losses caused by low-quality education.
Haykaz Fanyan, Head of the Armenian Center for Socio-Economic Studies (ACSES), reports in a Facebook post that the experts' assessments show that 39% of Armenian school students do not have basic skills, which means Armenia's economy losing great growth opportunities.
"The N1 scenario: if all Armenian school students mastered basic skills, other conditions being equal, Armenia would see a 2.7-fold growth by 2100," Mr Fanyan wrote.
According to Scenario 2, if all Armenian children of school age attended schools, other conditions being equal, Armenia's GDP would grow 1.4-fold by 2100.
According to Scenario 3, if all Armenian children of school age attended schools and mastered universal basic skills, other conditions being equal, Armenia would see 4.3-fold GDP growth.
CESifo has released the working paper entitled "Global Universal Basic Skills: Current Deficits and Implications for World Development".
The introduction reads, in particular:
"How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be internationally competitive? And what would accomplishing this mean for world development? Based on the micro data of international and regional achievement tests, we map achievement onto a common (PISA) scale. We then estimate the share of children not achieving basic skills for 159 countries that cover 98.1% of world population and 99.4% of world GDP. We find that at least two-thirds of the world's youth do not reach basic skill levels, ranging from 24% in North America to 89% in South Asia and 94% in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our economic analysis suggests that the present value of lost world economic output due to missing the goal of global universal basic skills amounts to over $700 trillion over the remaining century, or 11% of discounted GDP."
