自然资源租金抑制了高等教育发展吗?——基于跨国面板数据的经验分析

Does Natural Resource Rent Inhibit the Development of Higher Education?——An Empirical Analysis with Cross-Country Panel Data

最近30年来,尽管全球高等教育规模持续扩张,但是仍然有大量发展中国家高等教育发展停滞不前,尤其是一些自然资源丰富的国家。通过构建一个描述性理论框架,研究认为,丰厚的自然资源租金将会引起国家财政能力建设的租金偏向,相对抑制物质资本和人力资本积累,不利于高等教育可持续发展。利用最新的世界银行发展指标面板数据,研究检验了自然资源租金与高等教育入学率之间的关系,不同模型设定下的回归结果都显示自然资源租金确实对高等教育入学率造成了显著的负面影响。异质性分析表明,相对更依赖税收以及资本类税种为公共支出融资的低租金型国家,自然资源租金对高等教育负面影响非常微弱,反之则负面影响较强且显著。机制检验进一步支持了租金型国家存在的人力资本积累障碍,即自然资源租金不利于物质资本积累和资本劳动比上升,从而降低了与物质资本互补的人力资本投资激励。排除内生性的工具变量回归也支持了结论的稳健性,同时回归也发现丰富的自然资源租金收益可能并没有用于提升大学人均支出水平和降低生师比。

In the last three decades,despite the worldwide expansion of higher education,there are still a large number of developing countries that have stagnated in the improvement of higher education,especially in countries with rich natural resource.By constructing a descriptive theoretical framework,this paper predicts that abundance of natural resource will cause a rent bias of the building of state fiscal capacity,and relatively lower the accumulation of physical and human capital,which is not conducive to the sustainable development of higher education.Using the latest data from World Bank Development Indicators,this paper examines the relationship between natural resource rent and higher education in detail,and the regression results show that natural resource rent does have a significant negative impact on higher education in different specifications.Heterogeneity analysis shows that in low-rent countries that rely more on taxation of capital to finance public expenditure,the negative impact of natural resource rent on higher education is very weak,while the opposite is very strong and significant.Testing the potential mechanism further supports that there are barriers to human capital accumulation in resource rent-oriented countries,and the rent of natural resource hinders the accumulation of physical capital and the growth of capital to labor ratio,thus reducing the investment incentive of human capital which complements physical capital.The instrumental variable regressions that solve the endogeneity also supports the robustness of the conclusions,while the results also show that the rent of natural resource may not be conducive to raising the public expenditure per student as a percentage of GDP per capita and reducing the student-faculty ratio for higher education.