Education, Trade Reform and Investment Returns

This paper explores whether education and openness together can improve the development impact of investment projects - based on what we know of the World Bank's lending experience in the past twenty years. A framework is then proposed for the link between education, openness and investment returns. Our empirical results show that formal education, coupled with openness to trade and investment, has a strong positive correlation with investment returns and project performance. Fiscal discipline and good governance raise investment project returns, and corruption hampers project performance