Higher education expansion and national savings level: Evidence from macro data

Abstract

Through empirical research, this paper discusses the relationship between the expansion of higher education and the level of national savings. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the expansion of higher education on the national savings of the world's major economies and its internal mechanism.This paper selects the panel data of 30 major global economies such as Russia, the United States and China from 1991 to 2019, and makes an empirical analysis by using the system generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM). The research conclusion shows that the higher education expansion has a significant negative impact on the level of national savings level. In terms of heterogeneity analysis, it is found that in Asia, the negative effect of higher education development on national savings is greater than that in Europe and other regions; At the same time, among the seven emerging economies such as Russia, India and China, the impact of the development level of higher education on savings is slightly greater than that of the global sample; At last, we design the intermediary effect model to test the impact mechanism, and find that the expansion of higher education will reduce the level of national savings by reducing the risk of unemployment. We believe that the expansion of higher education can effectively reduce the level of national savings by reducing national preventive savings motivation, optimizing national investment and financial allocation and promoting national human capital investment to a certain extent.