The Relationship between Economic Growth and School Enrollment Rates: Time Series Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

It has long been argued that there is a close relationship between education and economic development at both individual and societal levels. Economists have found that the level of educational infrastructure is an important indicator of economic development. Similarly, economic variables have been found to be strongly related to school enrollment in many studies. Hence, we investigate the relationship between GDP per capita and school enrollment rates at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels during the period 1980–2008 in Turkey. To this end, we employed Toda-Yamamoto’s (1995) causality test. Findings of our analyses suggest that there is a statistically significant relationship between GDP per capita and the school enrollment rate at the primary level bi-directionally. A significant relationship between these two variables at the secondary level was also indicated in the study, but this relationship was only significant in one direction: from the GDP per capita to the secondary school enrollment rate. For the tertiary level, no casual relationship was found between changes in GDP per capita and the school enrollment rate

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