ifo Institute: Improved PISA Performance Could Give Economic Strength a Major Boost

For the entire EU, the potential earnings add up to EUR 71 trillion. This breaks down to EUR 9,7 trillion for the UK, EUR 9,5 trillion for France, EUR 7,6 trillion for Italy, EUR 6,0 trillion for Spain, and EUR 1,5 trillion for Austria (see table). The latest findings from the OECD’s PISA study will be released on Tuesday, December 3. They serve as an indicator of how schoolchildren rank globally in math, science, and reading.

“Several countries, such as Poland and Portugal, have enacted reforms that resulted in an increase of 25 PISA points. This also took place in Germany in the first few years after the ‘PISA shock’,” Woessmann adds, continuing: “Schools have to teach children and young people the skills they will need to succeed in the working world of tomorrow – our whole economic future is at stake.”

The basic skills in math and science that PISA measures play a particularly important role. “After its poor PISA results 18 years ago, Germany launched many initiatives to catch up with other countries. Lately, however, this commitment seems to be flagging. But the rest of the world isn’t sleeping. If we don’t manage to move our educational system up the international rankings, we are jeopardizing the welfare of our children,” Woessmann says.

Woessmann and Hanushek compare GDP development with improved educational performance to the status quo over the rest of the century. Their forecasts also take into account the dynamic of educational reforms: it takes a certain amount of time for decision-makers to adjust educational policy and programs, and it also takes some time before these reforms have an impact on young people’s scholastic performance. In turn, the economy won’t begin to adjust until the new, highly qualified workers make up a significant proportion of the workforce. Further projections take into account policy scenarios where performance improves primarily at the upper or the lower end of the spectrum, or the skills of high-school dropouts improve. However, all those projections predict distinctly lower economic output than those where improvements impact the entire performance spectrum.

The study was conducted for the European Expert Network on Economics of Education (EENEE), an organization jointly coordinated by the ifo Center for the Economics of Education together with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels, on behalf of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture

Study:

Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Wößmann, „The Economic Benefits of Improving Educational Achievement in the European Union: An Update and Extension“, EENEE Analytical Report No. 39, 2019 (PDF-Download)