The teaching crisis in less developed countries

There is a huge concern on the influence of teachers on students’ cognitive learning. However, little is known about the causal impact of teachers’ knowledge on students’ performance. In addition, this effect is likely to change depending on the group of countries and regions under analysis. In the current research, we propose to study this subject for sixth grade teachers and, concretely, for less developed regions. To achieve this aim, we have employed the heterogeneity within-student between-subjects of teachers’ subject knowledge on students’ academic achievement. We have found that, for the countries under analysis, teachers’ subject knowledge does not have a significant influence on students’ academic achievement; many robustness checks have supported this result. This could be indicating that, in these countries, teachers do not have enough knowledge to teach students, what brings some policy implications.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Interpreting Developed Countries' Foreign Direct Investment

Inward and outward direct investment (FDI) stocks and flows tend to go together, across countries and over time. The countries that invest extensively abroad are usually also large recipients of FDI. There is little evidence that flows of FDI are a major influence on capital formation. That lack of effects suggests that financing capital formation is not a primary role of FDI. FDI transfers the ownership of existing productive assets from one set of owners to others willing to pay more for them, possibly from less efficient to more efficient owners. One fact that suggests this function is that outward U.S. FDI production and outward minus inward production tends to be concentrated in industries of U. S. comparative advantage. It is not in industries of U.S. comparative disadvantage, as might be expected if FDI were primarily a method of relocating production to more suitable locations. Within individual broad industry groups, U.S. FDI tends to move to countries with comparative disadvantages in trade relative to the United States in machinery industries. In resource-intensive industries, however, it moves to countries with comparative advantages in trade relative to the United States. The difference suggests that company comparative advantages dominate investment in machinery, but country comparative advantages dominate in resource-intensive industries. If FDI is transferring assets and production from less efficient to more efficient owners and managers, inward FDI can be viewed in the recipient countries as freeing capital that had been frozen in industries that the owners would prefer to leave. It permits the former owners to allocate their capital in more desirable and profitable ways. Outward FDI permits a home country's firms to optimally exploit their skills and comparative advantages, perhaps lost to the home countries, but retained by the country's firms.

Real GDP Per Capita in Developed Countries

Growth rate of real GDP per capita is represented as a sum of two components – a monotonically decreasing economic trend and fluctuations related to a specific age population change. The economic trend is modeled by an inverse function of real GDP per capita with a numerator potentially constant for the largest developed economies. Statistical analysis of 19 selected OECD countries for the period between 1950 and 2004 shows a very weak linear trend in the annual GDP per capita increment for the largest economies: the USA, Japan, France, Italy, and Spain. The UK, Australia, and Canada show a larger positive linear trend. The fluctuations around the trend values are characterized by a quasi-normal distribution with potentially Levy distribution for far tails. Developing countries demonstrate the increment values far below the mean increment for the most developed economies. This indicates an underperformance in spite of large relative growth rates