Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions.
Over the past decade, Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie’s team at Cambridge University has compiled a database on southwest German villagers from 1600 to 1900, including court records, guild ledgers, and 9,000 inventories of personal possessions. Ogilvie believes these records 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.
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 industrialize 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 industrialize. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly, and they industrialized 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.
According to Ogilvie, 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. For example, if wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was 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?
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 labor migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence. [I]
[II] ‘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. [III]
‘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.’ [IV]
(Adapted from: Cambridge IELTS 17 + Adjusted by CEMA – Hoài Sơn)
