The more energy resources a country has, the less educational attainment.
My crude paraphrasing of this OECD study:
OECDâ??s PISA study shows that there is also a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their school population (see figure): Israel is not alone in outperforming its oil-rich neighbors by a large margin when it comes to learning outcomes at school, this is a global pattern that generally across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment. Exceptions such as Canada, Australia and Norway, that are rich of natural resources but still score well on PISA, have all established deliberate policies of saving these resource rents, and not just consuming them. Todayâ??s learning outcomes at school, in turn, are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.
One wonders how the U.S. will fare with its own potential resource boom in shale oil and gas. (Via: Simone Foxman)
