Education

Cost of a Quality Adjusted Educated Worker　受过有品质教育的工人的成本

Our single best measure of productivity is the relative cost of a country’s educated workforce adjusted for the quality of that education. To construct our measure we look at the relative cost of different cohorts of educated workers (college, high school, those without education), allowing us to get closer to the individuals where the competition occurs. We can then look at the average cost of those workers per hour worked (adjusting for differences like vacation). Further, we take into account the quality of education in one country versus another (e.g., if a high school graduate in the US costs the same as one in France, we also want to ask whether the quality of high school education is the same in both countries). For this adjustment, we use an internationally accepted measure of education quality.384 That allows us to compare for a given cohort the relative quality of workers’ education compared to the relative cost. To come up with an aggregate measure for a country we weight proportionally how much of its population is in each group because if a country’s workforce is highly educated, then most of the labor competition happens with other countries at those levels (e.g., between the drug researcher in the US and their peers in Germany). Of course we recognize there is some labor arbitrage across cohorts but this approach lets us capture the dynamic reasonably well.

我们单一的最佳生产力衡量标准是根据该教育质量进行调整的受过教育的国家的相对成本。为了构建我们的措施，我们考察了不同群体受过教育的工作人员（大学，高中，没有受教育的人）的相对成本，使我们能够更接近于竞争对手的个人。然后，我们可以看一下这些工作人员每小时工作的平均成本（调整假期差异）。此外，我们考虑到一个国家与另一个国家的教育质量（例如，如果美国高中毕业生的费用与法国的毕业生相同，我们也想询问高中教育的质量是否相同两国）。对于这种调整，我们使用国际公认的教育质量指标。4 这使得我们可以比较给定的队列相对于相对成本的工人教育的相对质量。为了提出一个国家的总体措施，我们按比例重量，每个人群中有多少人口，因为如果一个国家的劳动力受过高等教育，那么大多数劳动竞争与其他国家（如药物之间）发生美国研究员及其在德国的同行）。当然，我们认识到队列中有一些劳动套利，但这种做法让我们能够相当理想地掌握动态。

While there is, if anything, a negative relationship between a country’s level of education and its level of future growth (because more expensive countries tend to have more educated people who are more expensive), there is a high correlation between the relative cheapness of a country’s educated people and that country’s subsequent growth rate. To convey how important it is to consider whether these educated people are expensive or cheap, consider that while there is a -17% correlation between the average level of a country’s education and its future growth rate, there is a +66% correlation between cost-adjusted educated level and its future growth rate.

虽然有一个国家的教育水平与未来增长水平之间存在负相关关系（因为更昂贵的国家往往有更多的受过更多教育的人，而且价格更贵），相对廉价的国家受过教育的人民和该国的后续增长率。考虑到这些受过教育的人是否昂贵或便宜，那么说明一个国家教育的平均水平与未来增长率之间有一个17％的相关性，那么成本之间是+ 66％的相关性调整教育水平和未来增长率。

We show our aggregate measure below on the right, next to our measure of education quality385 on its own for perspective. Overall, India looks to have the most attractively priced educated population, followed by China, with Russia and Mexico not far behind. Looking across education levels, workers in India with similar levels of education cost a fraction as much as their peers in the US (around 1/20th). When we adjust for the quality of education in India being about 50% worse on average, the cost of a quality-adjusted worker in India is still about 1/10th that of a worker in the US. This isn’t all that different from how China’s workers looked 20 years ago. Remarkably, even as wages in China have risen substantially, so too have education levels and the quality of education—today the quality-adjusted cost of a worker in China is still highly attractive. Within the developed world, the US looks to have the most attractive educated workers, despite the quality of a US high school education now being worse than in other developed countries. In contrast, Europe’s educated labor appears to be the most expensive in the world by this measure. Despite quality being relatively good, the cost of workers there, particularly below college level, is high.

我们在下面显示我们的总体措施，就像我们对教育质量自身的观点一样。总的来说，印度的教育水平最高，其次是中国，俄罗斯和墨西哥并不遥远。纵观教育水平，工人在印度的教育水平相近的成本的一小部分不亚于他们在美国的同行（约1/20）。当我们调整了教育在印度被平均糟糕的约50％的质量，在印度质量调整工人的成本仍约1/10，在美国一个工人。这与20年前中国工人的看法并不完全一样。值得注意的是，即使中国的工资大幅上涨，教育水平和教育质量也上升，今天中国工人的质量调整成本仍然很有吸引力。在发达国家，美国看起来最有吸引力的教育工作者，尽管美国高中教育的质量现在比其他发达国家差。相比之下，欧洲受过教育的劳动力似乎是世界上最昂贵的劳动力。尽管质量相对较好，但在那里的工人的成本，特别是在大学以下的成本却很高。

Below we take a more granular look at our measure for each cohort of education level, which we use to build up to the aggregate picture. This approach gives us a much richer picture. For example, in the US college-educated workers adjusted for quality are more expensive than college-educated workers in Spain. But at the high school level and below, workers in the US are much cheaper than those in Spain. And since that’s where the competition occurs between most workers for these countries, overall the US comes out more attractive. We show below some other points we find interesting.

下面我们对每个教育级别的测量进行更细致的分析，我们用来构建总体情况。这种方法给我们一个更丰富的图片。例如，在美国，受质量调适的大学教育工作者比西班牙的大学教育工作者要昂贵得多。但在高中及以下地区，美国的工人比西班牙便宜得多。而且由于这些国家的大多数工人之间的竞争是发生的，所以美国总体上更有吸引力。我们在下面显示一些我们觉得有趣的其他观点