Three Essays on Natural Resource Abundance and Jordan's Education System
[Thesis]
Al Massad, Zaidoon
Omari, Swinton
Howard University
2020
108
Ph.D.
Howard University
2020
Education is a major factor in economic development in Jordan. Although the country lacks many natural resources, it has invested heavily in its human resources through the provision of quality education. While there is still room for improvement and growth, the country has reached notable milestones in economic development even though it is located in a chaotic region. This dissertation examined the impacts of higher education as well as primary and secondary education with other variables on Jordan's economic growth during the period 2000-2018 by looking at the potential differential effects of graduated students by degree, gender, and government spending. Data were collected from the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Education in Jordan and the World Bank. The main goal was to confirm the importance of investing in all levels of education and the increase in the overall quality of Jordanian education and economic growth. The results revealed that higher education provided a positive and significant effect overall on Jordan's economic growth and that secondary and higher education played the most prominent role in this process. To realize its 2025 vision, the country needs to make major reforms in its key economic sectors, education being one of them. Some of the key areas that the government needs to increase include the years of schooling and the government spending on education because these two areas are major contributors to economic growth. Finally, this dissertation also investigated the question of whether there is a so called "natural resources curse," which contends that people in resource-rich countries generally experience very low per capita income. The cause of the curse is often placed on the labor market in the oil industry, which usually employs unskilled workers while people in other countries are willing to obtain more education to improve their skills in order to improve their performance and thereby increase the country's GDP per capita. The results show that the curse of natural resources does not exist in the Arab countries, hence Jordan, which was consistent with the findings of "The Curse of Natural Resources" study that differentiated between the following two terms: resource abundance and resource dependence. More recent empirical work supports the fact that the curse of natural resources disappears when the country is experiencing resource abundance rather than resource dependence, which may explain why Arab countries have been affected positively by the abundance of oil.