Education and Economic Growth in Malaysia: The Issues of Education Data

Human capital or education has become one of the central issues in the study of economic development. The existing literature suggests that human capital, especially education, is an important component of economic growth. This paper explores the issues of Malaysia education data. Despite some issues and data quality problems, Malaysian education datasets are highly correlated for both secondary and tertiary education data. This paper also tests the effect of different datasets on education and growth relationship. The results are very similar suggesting that Malaysian education datasets are reliable. The results are robust regardless of education measure. All datasets lead to similar conclusion; education is negatively related to economic growth.