by Riccardo Pelizzo

International organizations have long believed that education is a main driver, if
not the main driver, of economic growth and development. Unsurprisingly many
developing nations have attempted to set up world class (research) universities that
would provide them with knowledge, skills, and competencies. They did so
because they believed, as the international community had long voiced, that this
knowledge could translate into research, innovation, modernization or, in a word,
development.
Whether the reality has met the expectations is not entirely clear. Togo set up in
1970 the University of Benin, which later on was renamed as University of Lomè,
and it is far from clear whether the creation and the functioning of such university
has yielded the developmental and economic dividends that policy makers had
hoped so.
The GNI per capita of Togo was of 130 US dollars in 1970. It increased to 420 in
1980, it dropped to 230 in 1984, it grew to 400 in 1990. it declined to 300 in 1994
and in 1995 it was estimated to be of about 250 US dollars—which is the same
value it had reached in 1986.
In the best possible scenario this evidence suggests that the establishment of a great
institution of higher learning stimulated the economy and economic growth, but
was not able to sustain them. In the worst possible case, one may be tempted to say
that the creation of a great university had no impact on the economic fortunes of
the country.
Those who simply look at numbers may not appreciate why this may have been the
case and so we rely on our modest experience of the country to formulate some
educated guesses.
When the University of Lomè was created in 1970 it had a fantastic, massive,
modern, impressive campus. It had large lecture halls, seminar rooms, and housing
for students. By the time we visited the campus of the University of Lomè, lecture
halls, seminar rooms and dorms were still there. But they were not in a terribly
good shape. The gardens around the campus had been neglected for God knows
how long, where once there had been grass and flowers, there was only dirt and
dust. The buildings were for the most part in need of serious repair. The large
lecture halls still worked, but the smaller seminar and lecture rooms were in
shamble.
A friend invited me to give a talk to a group of students. We met in one of the
seminar/study rooms. There were no door and no windows, the air conditioner had
been dead for longer than anybody could remember, and the small class -without
white board, black boards, and all the gadgets that one expects to find in a
classroom-had nothing to resemble a functioning classroom.
One could easily imagine why the campus had decayed so much. The University,
the government, may not have the financial resources to pay for the maintenance of
the facilities of such a big, massive campus. Keeping a campus going is costly.
And it is a luxury that only the rich (countries) can afford. Which leads me to a
final consideration.
The reason why correlation analysis usually displays a strong, positive, linear,
significant relationship between education and wealth is not that education
generates wealth, but is that only rich countries can afford to finance education and
to ensure the proper functioning of institutions of higher learning.
If our understanding of the relationship between education and development is -to
some extent- correct, there is a lesson to be learned: pushing developing countries
to devote sizeable portions of their modest budgets to establish and run costly
tertiary education institutions does not boost their socio-economic development, it
deprives them of the resources that they’d have more profitably used for other
developmental purposes, and it prevents that socio-economic development that
developing countries were hoping to achieve.

(June 24, 2018)