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Mauritius: Education as an Engine of Growth
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L'Express (Port Louis)
26 February 2008
Posted to the web 26 February 2008
Port Louis
The Bureau of Catholic Education had a very interesting visit by Prof. Paul Romer on Tuesday 29th January 2008. Guest of the Board of Investment, Prof. Paul Romer, one of the nation's leading economists, was the primary developer of New Growth Theory whereby economic growth does not arise just from adding more labour to more capital, but from new and better ideas expressed as technological progress.
Prof. Paul Romer is currently the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Stanford, he taught economics at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. Adviser to the Government of Singapore in the area of education, he is also the founder of Aplia, which develops and applies technologies for improving student learning. This work springs from his conviction that improving education at all levels will be the key to sustaining technological progress in the twenty-first century and that better educational technology will lead to better educational outcomes.
Invited by the Board of Investment for this visit to Mauritius, he expressed his interest in meeting representatives of Government and the private sector, thus the Bureau of Catholic Education. In attendance at the working session were Gilberte Chung Kim Chung, Director, Alain Doolub, Secretary of RCEA, Jimmy Harmon, Centre de Formation Pour Educateurs, and Dr. Michael Ah Tow, Economist & Rector of BPS College.
Several vital theoretical and practical issues were raised about the role of education as an engine of growth in Mauritius amidst a global economic framework. Key issues related to the role of human capital and the use of a differentiation strategy in education were discussed. Following a dynamic panel data approach, education has, indeed, a significant and positive long-run effect on economic growth. Moreover, the size of this effect is stronger as the level of education (primary, secondary, and tertiary) increases. It was obvious that this has a straightforward policy implication in terms of governments' actions towards a complete reform and a structural change in the educational system.
One of the determining factors was stability in any educational reform. Bringing changes and reverting to another structure every five years is not conducive to progress. Moreover, if from any original cohort at point of entry in Std I in primary, only 50% are SC holders and only 25% HSC holders, and a lesser percentage still have access to tertiary education, staying in that educational system where there is so much wastage in terms of human resources will not lead to economic growth. The necessity of a new structure with differentiated learning and diverse career orientations at parity in the salary scale is evident.
The issue of exclusion was broached and factors like poverty and language barriers were discussed. The rate of drop-outs, the number of street children, the non-formal education centres for adolescents and adults, the other private fee-paying education centres with low academic performers, the pre-vocational education students and their difficult access to the vocational training courses seemed to be matters of great interest to Prof. P. Romer. As he puts it, we cannot expect larger gains in terms of higher economic growth in Mauritius if these issues are not looked into.
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Ideas, in Prof. P. Romer's formulation, really do have consequences. Big ones. So he was interested in the current projects of the Bureau of Catholic Education ( Prevokbek, Multilingualism and School Achievements with the Kreol Morisien 2010 Projet, Counseling, Mixed Abilities and Multiple Intelligences, In-service Teacher Training ) and some of the future projects ( Open Community School, Polytechnic Education .) . These projects could play major roles in education for innovation.
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