Are you familiar with the work of Dale Jorgensen and others on human capital,
which was controversial 30 years ago but generally accepted in most
international development circles? Most of the empirical work I've seen treats
literacy as a first tier and progresses to broader measures of educational
attainment (e.g., years of schooling). The World Bank's World Development
Report on poverty and development, a few years back, jumped through
sophisticated hoops to prove that the way to alleviate poverty wasn't to give
people income but control over income-earning assets--with the main asset
being themselves (with education as the means to earning income) and land in
agricultural settings. National data on literacy and income are online from
various sources like the Bank
(http://www.cdinet.com/DEC/wdi98/new/databytopic/databytopic.html) and UNDP
(http://www.undp.org/undp/hdro/hdi.htm). If you are more adventurous, you can
get guess-timates of human capital and other forms of wealth for all nations
of the world in the GAEA 'grey material' behind a 1995 report I authored at
the Bank, Monitoring Environmental Progress (http://www-
esd.worldbank.org/html/esd/env/publicat/mep/mep.htm).
On my own, I have enriched quantification of some alternative development
strategies by developing a database of a dozen key indicators, including
literacy/educational attainment, for a hierarchy of 1500 human settlements
(going subnational for populous nations). While it will be a few months before
I'm ready to present my findings, income correlates about as well with
education , health (infant mortality/life expectancy), and infrastructure
(electricity consumption), whether one looks at nations or finer grain human
settlements. The relative "bang for the buck' or coefficients change as the
world is viewed in greater detail, but not dramatically. There are dramatic
differences, however, if one contrasts human settlements under substantial
demographic pressure (high population density and growth rate) with those
under light pressure (low population density and growth rate). I maintain that
demonstrates not only the underlying importance of population issues but the
inter-connectedness of development facets, and the need for sampling frames in
studying development solutions.
John O'Connor
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