Paul Gillingham: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think human capital is by far the biggest problem. Then the slow rate at which small informal businesses are willing to enter the more heavily regulated sector is a real bottleneck. Mexico has a lot of human capital. One of the reasons that this population control works is because you get far more people going through those critical first three years of primary school. Ideally, everyone goes through high school. But that’s just not a global reality. The key metric is how many people you’re getting through three years of school, which teach you to read, write, and do rudimentary maths. Mexico’s record on that is far better than most middle-income comparatives. There’s a really good study which says especially women, far more get those first three years than precisely actually in India, Kenya, and Egypt. We’re looking now at this phase of takeoff I’m talking about, of the ’70s and ’80s. I think the human capital is really there. A lot of Latin America has above-average years of schooling for their income level, but pretty low test scores, pretty low performance at the top. Just for instance, that English, even getting by in conversation in Mexico, seems to be only about 7 percent. That, to me, is remarkably low, especially given how many of them migrate or wish to migrate. I think education has failed Mexico. Even though people, yes, they show up at the building, the teachers often aren’t good. Sometimes in the pueblos, they’re not even there.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.