Effect of Education on Ease of Doing Business in Conditions of Innovation Development: Factor Analysis and Multiple Regression

Abstract

Education accelerates changes and transformations in social life, as well as one of the main factors of progress and development in general and business. The article substantiates and formalises the relationships between indicators of the level of education (taking into account its innovative development) and the ease of doing business based on evidence from 28 world countries and the data from the World Bank, the United Nations, Tufts University and Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services. The article aims to find indicators of innovative education that most significantly contribute to the ease of doing business. For this, cognitive analysis of statistical data is carried out, and with the help of descriptive analysis tools, a statistically significant characteristic space of indicators is formed. Checking the density and direction of the relationship is carried out by calculating the values of the Pearson correlation coefficients. The multidimensionality of input feature space is reduced to the four most significant indicators from nine investigated ones (digital development indicator; human development index; digital trust, financial literacy index) using the procedure of principal component analysis and orthogonal transformation using the Varimax method in the Statgraphics Centurion 19 software. The quality of the factorisation is confirmed by Kaiser-Meier-Olkin testing and Bartlett’s sphericity testing. As a result of the developed multiple econometric models, which describe the dependence of ease of doing business and the above indicators, and the Backward Stepwise Selection hard screening procedure in Statgraphics 19, a statistically significant model of the effect of digital development on ease of doing business is built. It shows that with the value increase of digital development by 1%, ease of doing business will also increase by 0.79%. The obtained results can be useful to scientists for further research, as well as to change-makers in education and business and all stakeholders in the direction of «business–education» competition.