我国教育支出影响经济发展水平吗？来自全国省际时空大尺度数据的经验验证

Does Expenditure on Education of Our Country Affect Level of Economic Development? Empirical Verification of Large-Scale Data from National Interprovincial Data

摘要: 中国经济已经进入不同以往的、相对稳定的状态。我国经济工作现在面临的问题是产业结构转型和经济高质量发展。基于全国1978~2020年31个省市的面板数据，采用高相关、低方差滤波对原始数据集进行特征降维；其次，利用随机森林建模方法提取控制变量的贡献重要性特征；最后，构建个体固定效应下的静态和动态面板回归模型，探讨教育支出对经济发展水平的影响机制。结果表明：1) 不同省份的经济发展水平差异非常大；2) 教育支出对经济水平的影响显著；3) 经济发展水平整体上体现了区域协同发展的思想；4) 地区前一年的GDP对后一年的GDP有着正向的影响。据此建议：1) 重视教育发展；2) 提高教育支出；3) 实现均衡发展，加强成熟型城市群核心城市的教育吸引力，促进教育与经济的协调发展；4) 实现综合发展，各地应保持整体发展的态势，注重协同合作，推动经济蓬勃发展。

Abstract: China’s economy has transitioned into a distinct and comparatively stable phase. Presently, the economic agenda in China confronts the challenges of industrial restructuring and the pursuit of high-quality economic advancement. Based on the panel data of 31 provinces from 1978 to 2020, the feature dimension of the original data set was reduced by high correlation and low variance filtering. Secondly, the random forest modeling method is used to extract the contribution importance characteristics of the control variables. Finally, the static and dynamic panel regression models under the individual fixed effect are constructed to explore the mechanism of the influence of education expenditure on the level of economic development. The results show that the ability of education expenditure has a significant positive influence on improving the level of economic development in different provinces and cities. The results indicate the following: 1) The level of economic development in different provinces varies greatly. 2) Education expenditure has a significant impact on the economic level. 3) The overall economic development reflects the concept of regional coordinated development. 4) The GDP of the previous year has a positive effect on the GDP of the following year. Based on these findings, the following recommendations are proposed: 1) Give high priority to the development of education. 2) Increase education expenditure. 3) Achieve balanced development by enhancing the educational attractiveness of core cities in mature urban clusters and promoting the coordinated development of education and the economy. 4) Strive for comprehensive development by maintaining a holistic development momentum, emphasizing collaboration, and promoting robust economic growth.