| Summary: | <p>Growth theories and the role of human capital formation in development remain
widely-discussed topics in the field of education economics. While a plethora of studies
that use school enrollment rates as a proxy for human capital fail to explain the
variation in per-capita GDP growth, more recent work in the economics of education
shows that cognitive skills are essential for development. How these skills are formed,
however, is less clear and should be investigated. This dissertation examines whether
cognitive skills, measured by science and mathematics, explain human development in
Sudan. Drawing on the 2018 Sudanese National Learning Assessment, part of the Basic
Education Recovery Project of World Bank (2019a), the questions are: Do cognitive
skills matter for development? If so, what explains their variation? The findings,
achieved through correlation analyses between state-level poverty rates and science
& mathematics achievement, show a robust significant relationship. Additionally,
multivariate OLS models indicate that components of Cunha and Heckman (2007)
theory on skill formation such as subsequent achievement, parental and environmental
factors and a student asset index created with a machine-learning algorithm explain
the variation in science achievement.</p>
|
|---|