The Contribution of Education to the Quality of Labor: Comment
David Schwartzman argues in a recent issue of this Review [5] that the estimate g,iven in my Sources of Economic Growth [1] for the rise in the quality of labor due to additional education was far too big. His comment appeared nine months after, but was written before, publication of my Why Growth Rates Differ [3]; I shall also refer to that book in order to bring the discussion up to date.' I must first correct Schwartzman's summary of my substantive results. He reports [5, p. 508] that in Sources ... . Denison ascribes over three-fifths of the growth in ouitput per man-hour to increased My estimates actually implied 29 percent: .67 percentage points [1, Table 33] out of a growth rate of outpuit per man-hour in the whole economy of 2.34 percent.2 In Why Growth Rates Dier, my procedures were altered to reduce the effect of changes in days of school attended per school year and, with more data available, to incorporate some refinements; for the 1950-62 period they yielded .49 percentage points as the contribution of education [3, Table 21-1]. If applied in the 1929-57 period, the change in my allowance for school days would cut my estimate of .67 percentage points to about .5, or 21-22 percent of the growth of output per man-hour. In discussing Schwartzman's specific points, I shall usually refer to growth rates of educational quality indexes for civilian labor. These exceed contributions of increased education of the labor force to growth rates of national income because 1), civilian labor represents only a fraction of total factor input, and 2), in some activities the change in output is measured by employment or manhours so a change in labor quality cannot affect measured output. My educational quality index for civilians grew at a rate of .75 in 1950-62 [3, Table 8-5, column 4] while the contribution was .49 percentage points. Thus, any change in the civilian quality index would alter the contribution by about one-third less. My quality index is constructed in two stages. First, I compute an index based only on changes in the distribution of the labor force by years of education. Second, I allow for increased school attendance per school year. Schwartzman does the same. Growth rates of civilian quality indexes compare as follows:
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