Does education fuel economic growth?

教育能否助燃经济增长？

A Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

A 在过去十年里，关于德国西南地区村民在1600至1900年间生活情况的一个大型数据库由一支来自剑桥大学经济学院的Sheilagh Ogilvie教授带领下的团队编纂了出来。数据库里有法庭记录、行会分户账薄、教区登记信息、村庄人口普查、纳税单以及——这是一个最近新增的补充——9,000份手写的财产清单，列出了超过一百万件属于生活在这三个世纪里的普通男男女女的财产物品。Ogilvie是30年前在两个德国社区的档案馆中发现的这批财产清单，她相信在它们之中也许包含着一道困扰了经济学家很长时间的谜题的答案：关于教育作为一个国家经济增长诱发因素的证据匮乏。

B As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

B 正如Ogilvie解释所说，教育帮助我们更有产出地工作，发明创造更好的技术，并且获得更高收入 …… 它当然势必对经济增长起着至关重要的作用？但是，如果你反观一下历史长河，并没有证据表明有着更高的文化水平就能使得一个国家更早地工业化。在1600到1900年之间，英格兰的国民文化水平按照欧洲的标准来看只是一般水平而已，然而其经济飞速发展，还是第一个实现了工业化的国家。在同一时期里，德国和斯堪的纳维亚有着极佳的国民文化水平，但是它们的经济增速缓慢，工业化进程也较晚。现代的跨国家分析也一直在艰难挣扎着寻找支持教育引发经济增长的证据，尽管已存在着大量证据表明：反向来看经济增长是可以提升教育程度的，她补充说。

C In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and educationrelated objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry.

C Ogilvie正在分析的这些手写财产清单上列出了男女众生在结婚、再婚和死亡时的财产。从獾皮到《圣经》，从缝纫设备到红色女紧身衣——村民们的全部俗世所有物都被包含在了其中。关于农耕器材和手工工具的财产清单显示了经济活动；拥有的书籍和诸如铅笔石板这类教育相关物品展示了人们是如何学习的。此外，数据库材料中的税收清单记录了农场、工坊、财产和债务的价值几何；签名和人们对自己年龄的估计体现了读写和算术能力；法庭记录还透露了扼杀行业发展的阻碍因素(例如行会的行为)。

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

先前的研究通常只有一种方法将教育关联于经济增长——也许是学校和印刷机构的存在，或者学校的入学登记注册情况，又或是签下自己名字的能力。根据Ogilvie的说法，这份数据库为同一个人提供了多样的指标，使得我们有可能从长远角度出发，分析这些男男女女在读写能力、计数能力、财富与勤奋程度之间的联系。

D Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

D Ogilvie及其团队一手搭建起来的这个关于个人物质财产的巨大数据库，其基础是他们对生活在这两个德国社区中的人们的全方位人口统计式重建。我们可以追踪相同的这群人——以及他们的后代——穿越300年的教育和经济变迁;她说道。一位位个体的人生在他们眼前铺陈开来。例如24岁的Ana Regina和Magdalena Riethmllerin的故事，她们在1707年由于应该在教堂里认真听布道的时候却在读书而受到了惩戒。这告诉了我们：她们在离开学校至少十年之后仍在锻炼自己的阅读能力，Ogilvie这样解读。数据库里还有Juliana Schweickherdt的故事，她在1752年受到了当地纺织工行会的责罚，理由是违抗行会法令而纺织布匹和梳理羊毛。当Juliana持续接下了原本专为男性行会成员保留的活计时，她被传唤到了行会法庭上，被告知要支付一笔相当于一个仆人一年薪水三分之一的罚款。这个行为按照今天的标准看来只是一个小小的违抗，但它却反映出了在那个时代，德国和其它地方的法律管制着人们进入劳动力市场的途径。行会的统治不但阻止了人们运用他们的技能，而且还抑制了哪怕是最简单的技术创新。

E The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

E 这个项目的数据收集阶段已经完成，而现在，按照Ogilvie的说法，是时候提出一些宏观大问题了。考查教育是否能引发经济增长的一种方式是持久拥有财富。这需要去追踪财富水平相同的一批不同的人在一段时间里的生活状况。如果财富是持久的，就有可能看出教育是否，比如说，关联于开垦种植新庄稼，或者采用了例如缝纫机这样的行业创新。这支团队还会去探寻教育的哪些方面帮助人们更多地参与创造性和创新型的活动。答案会是，比如说，读写能力、计数能力、拥有书籍、求学年限么？是否存在一个门槛水平——某个临界点——需要达到以后才会影响到经济表现呢？

F Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

F Ogilvie希望在接下来的几年间开始着手找到这些问题的答案。有一件事已经很清晰了，她说道：教育与经济发展之间的关系远没有那么简单直白。讲德语的欧洲中心地区是一个用来测试经济增长各种理论的理想实验室，她这样解释。在1600到1900年间，识字率和书籍拥有率很高，然而该地区却贫困如旧。同时，当地行会和商人组织权势滔天，会立法禁止一切能破坏他们垄断的行为。在整个地区内的村庄里，行会严禁劳动力流动，也会抗拒所有可能会削弱其影响力的变化。

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

早期发现显示：教育对于经济的潜在益处有可能被其它壁垒所阻隔，这一点对今天也有启发提示，Ogilvie说道。大量金钱泼向了在发展中国家提升教育，但是如果各种限制性因素阻碍了人们——特别是女性和穷人——以更有经济生产力的方式来运用他们所受到的教育，这笔花费就没法产出经济增长。例如，如果经济机构设置不善，教育就并不能引向发展。