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Más abajo ver discurso de Angel Gurría, Secretario General de la OECD, con ocasión de la mesa redonda sobre Education and Economic Development, UNESCO, 19 octubre 2007.

UNESCO Ministerial Round Table on Education and Economic Development
Keynote Speech by Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General
Paris, 19 October 2007
Dr. G. Matsuura, Ministers.
It is a great honour for me to speak to you today as you begin your deliberations on education and economic development. The theme of your round table is a topic that draws together the two organisations that Mr. Matsuura and I head- UNESCO and OECD – in ways that may have been unimaginable a decade ago when education and economic debate often went off on separate tracks.
Globalisation has propelled education to the top of policymakers’ agendas in OECD and developing countries alike. In a highly competitive globalised economy, knowledge, skills and know-how are key factors for productivity, economic growth and better living conditions. The good news is that effective and innovative education policies open enormous opportunities for individuals; the bad news is that weak educational systems result in declining standards, social exclusion and unemployment. There is no middle ground. So we must strive for excellence.
But education is not simply a tool for economic growth. Access to education is a goal in itself, a basic human right to help every person to develop their potential and participate in society, to cope effectively with a rapidly changing world. I am not only talking about coping with change as skills and jobs emerge and evolve. I am talking about education empowering individuals to be fully active citizens in a world where climate change, multi-culturalism, and technological innovation are changing everyday life – from diet, to healthcare, to leisure, to how we communicate and participate in a democratic process. It is also an indispensable tool to foster solidarity and understanding in a rather unequal and very complex world.
That’s my vision of education and what is at stake. Let me now turn to the link between education and economic development. I am convinced that if we ignore this link, we jeopardise our ability to give our citizens the education systems they need and want.
At the OECD, we are permanently trying to identify quantify the factors that determine economic growth. We found that education was a more important driver of growth than business investment, population growth, or even price stability.
Our estimates show that adding one extra year to the average years of schooling increases GDP per capita by 4 to 6 per cent. Two main paths of transmission can explain this result: First, education builds human capital and enables workers to be more productive. Second, education increases countries’ capacity to innovate – an indispensable prerequisite for growth and competitiveness in today’s global knowledge economy.
So, public investment in education pays off in terms of economic growth. But it also pays off for individuals. In most OECD countries, better educated adults earn more than less educated people; they find jobs more easily, and they are less likely to become unemployed. University-level qualifications continue to be valued highly everywhere. Even in the countries with the largest growth of university graduates, earnings and employment prospects of graduates keep improving. Finally, more qualified persons are more likely to participate in further training as adults: it’s a virtuous circle — learning begets learning.
But it’s not just years of education that matter. We cannot lose sight of the quality of education. From an individual perspective, the emphasis on quality comes as no surprise. We all know how important, but also how hard it is to choose the right schools – when you have a choice – for our children, and the best universities – again, when you have a choice – to advance on a chosen career path. But quality also matters for the economy as a whole. New evidence confirms that the quality of education, as measured through tests of student’s cognitive skills has a strong impact on economic growth. In fact, increasing just the quantity of education without regard to its quality may do little for economic development. This is why we at the OECD place a very strong emphasis on developing tools to help countries improve the quality of their education systems.
What are the implications of these empirical results for you, as policymakers? To reap the highest benefits of education for your countries you will have to tackle the dual challenge of increasing the quantity of education and ensuring the highest possible level of quality.
It is fair to say that huge progress has been made to raise education levels in all countries. Among others, UNESCO has raised awareness on this important issue. Our citizens have insisted on more education — our governments have responded. In OECD countries, public spending on education has increased by almost half in real terms over the past decade; today it accounts for 5.0 percent of GDP. In the past 30 years in the OECD the share of persons completing secondary education has risen by more than 40 percent, and the share completing higher education, by nearly 70 percent.
Outside the OECD area, investment in education is naturally somewhat lower. The World Education Indicators prepared jointly by the UNESCO and OECD show that, on average, public expenditure on education was only 3.8 per cent of GDP in 2004 for the 15 non OECD countries for which we have data. But progress towards achieving the millennium goal of universal primary education is encouraging. As you know, we also work intensively with the poorest countries of the world through the Development Assistance Committee. So we are looking forward to contributing to the achievement of the Millenium Development Goals.
In developing regions of the world, enrolment in primary education has risen to 88 percent. In Eastern Asia, South Eastern Asia, Northern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean it is 94 percent or higher. The most dramatic improvement has been in Sub-Saharan Africa where enrolment rates have risen by nearly a third since the early 1990s. Still, to keep developing countries on track, much more needs to be invested in education to make primary education truly universal and to expand secondary education.
Although it happens everywhere, in developing countries education competes for scarce public resources with other urgent needs such as healthcare or infrastructure. Simply spending more will not guarantee better outcomes; our evidence shows only a rather weak relationship between total education expenditures and student performance. Thus, increasing the productivity of public spending is a challenge that all countries face. This means that not only quantity and quality are issues, but also the pertinence of education and the fact that we must provide education that prepares children and students to go on and do better in the world – and in the labour markets.
This takes us to the challenge of assuring high quality standards in education – one of the most trying tasks for education ministers. The OECD has developed tools to help policymakers to measure educational outcomes and judge performance in comparison to other countries. OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment – better known to all of you by the name of PISA –examines how well prepared 15 year olds are to meet the challenges of today’s knowledge societies. Carried out every three years, results from the 2006 round of PISA will be published in a few weeks (on December 4). They will cover the 30 OECD members and 27 non-member countries and even more countries will participate in the 2009 round. We are very happy and very proud that we will then have more non-OECD countries than OECD members participating in this exercise. This means that PISA and the OECD are becoming truly global.
OECD countries are exploring ways to extend our PISA assessments to primary-school age children, nine-year olds. As this step towards refining our tools for quality assessment would be a particularly important in countries still striving for universal primary education, I want to tell Mr. Matsuura and this Assembly that would be delighted to take this up as a joint effort with UNESCO.
But even with solid methods to evaluate and compare the quality of education, making policy decisions on spending remains a challenge. Policymakers face difficult choices: should the main focus be on providing good primary and secondary education for all or should we equip our systems to produce software programmers, rocket scientists and brain surgeons? Ideally, you would want to have both at the same time. But resource constraints often put a brake on such aspirations and force countries to choose one rather than the other.
As I mentioned earlier, there is much evidence that higher education drives innovation and economic growth. But I would still like to caution against letting investment in higher education run ahead of investment in elementary and secondary schools. Higher education is expensive. In OECD countries, a place in tertiary education costs twice as much as one in lower-level schools. In developing countries, a place in tertiary education can be up to 25 times as expensive as in primary education.
Countries at earlier stages of development should take care of basics first before investing heavily in higher education. For good reasons the Millennium Development Goals call for universal and equal access to primary and secondary education for boys and girls. Where primary education for all has not become a reality yet, it may, on balance, be less expensive and more efficient to focus on this area, given the resources at hand.
Students moving on to higher education can have a range of choices and they may also want to take advantage of higher education offered by outside providers. All of this might be accomplished as part of development assistance strategies. The Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross Border Higher Education, developed by UNESCO and the OECD, make it easier to identify high quality providers on an international level. OECD is also exploring the feasibility of assessing quality at this level by launching PISA for higher education, as it was requested by Ministers in Athens. In fact, the theme of the latest issue of Education at a Glance that we launched recently was higher education.
Many developing countries are concerned about losing their highly educated citizens after they finish studies – whether at home or abroad. This risk is real: foreign born persons now comprise more than 12 percent of the labour force in OECD countries. And those with high levels of qualifications, such as medical doctors and nurses, are over-represented among the graduates from tertiary education who leave their home countries. The outflow of highly qualified personnel from developing countries is not the cause of shortages in sending countries. These shortages existed before but the outflows make the situation worse, particularly in some key fields such as health care. But brain drain is not inevitable. Many people would work in their own country if they had good job opportunities. Our priority must be to create such opportunities for all citizens, whether they were educated at home or abroad. There is also the question of vocational training and lifelong learning as they have a clear impact on economic growth, investment and productivity. And for individuals they affect jobs and earnings.
In all cases, educational policies should provide the basis for people to succeed. necessary. We should also strive to establish clear criteria to make quality of education a goal for all. Successful learning experiences involve enabling environments at school, at home, at work everywhere. They also require a society that values, supports and rewards education.
The challenge is complex and you, as policymakers, are only in control of some of the variables. Education ministers have a difficult task convincing and selling their arguments to ministers of finance. Making policy also requires courage to take the right measures, to confront vested interests and to reform, even when there is a high political cost.
At the OECD, we never pretend to tell countries what they need to do. They know that better than we do. But we try to help by telling them what others are doing, just to avoid complacency. So we might succeed in helping to increase the willingness to address reforms. The OECD is ready to help – both with the analysis and technical aspects of reforms, and the often difficult aspects of the political economy of reform, in particular how to sell reforms to public opinion, parliaments and all the sectors involved.
Our people deserve the best education we can provide and our countries’ economic development will benefit from increased participation in high quality education. We are proud of what has been achieved but we are not complacent and we should remain unsatisfied and running scared. We should continue to be hungry for change and strive for excellency. I look forward to continuing our fruitful co-operation with UNESCO and with all of your countries on this important task.