Croissance et formation : le rôle de la politique éducative

Growth and Training: The Role of Education Policies, by Eve Caroli. This paper proposes a preliminary approach to the relation between growth and training policies. We use an extended version of the 1988 R. Lucas model, which was one of the first attempts at making human capital endogenous in a growth model. Our hypothesis is that the productivity of average per-capita training time - in terms of human capital growth rates - is not independent of the characteristics of the education system. We posit that it is an increasing, yet saturating, function of the training rate, which here is the exogenous variable in the education policy. Correlatively, the production function expression takes account of the fact that trainers represent so many staff less in the final production sector. The solving of the model shows that the economy's growth rate is an increasing and then decreasing function of the training rate all the way down the balanced growth path. This means that beyond a certain threshold, the increase in the training rate is counterproductive for growth. There thus exists an optimal training policy. This policy varies with the efficiency of the teachers. It is concluded that the lower the quality of the training staff and/or the poorer the teaching conditions, the lower the maximum growth rate able to be attained by the economy.