Estimating the Impact of Education on Growth in a Small Data-Poor Country: the Case of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Education has long been viewed as an important contributor to sustainable development through its impact on employment, poverty reduction and economic growth. Unfortunately, small data-poor countries have historically been omitted from studies seeking to quantify these links. This paper builds on existing methodologies to estimate human and physical capital datasets for previously excluded countries like Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. We then employ our database to investigate whether a better-educated labour force spurs growth over the period 1970–2019. We specify a general unrestricted error correction model and apply the Autometrics algorithm to ensure that model is congruent and parsimonious. We find that average years of schooling is positively related to growth. Concerning the contribution of different levels of education, we find no evidence that increasing the share of workers with only primary education impacts growth in SVG. However, increasing the share of workers with secondary and tertiary education boosts growth in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]