Relationship Between the Level of Economic Development and Education Level of the Employed Population

Abstract

The sphere of education forms the structure of the country’s population in terms of education level, which must meet the needs of real sectors of activity. Achieving a balance of supply and demand, considered at the level of demand for personnel of a certain level of education, presupposes finding an optimal match, at which the current demand is satisfied and at the same time there is a “positive” contradiction that stimulates further development. The problem of achieving a balance lies in the need to take into account this contradiction, the definition of which is not as obvious as if an assessment is carried out in order to satisfy only the current demand. Publication`s review on this issue shows that the emphasis is on the benefits of a particular level of education both for individuals receiving it and for the whole society, while the assessment of compliance with the level of socio-economic development is carried out only in relation to a specific country. Conclusions that can be extended to other countries are recommendatory and they do not offer a universal method to assess the level of the achieved balance. Method is proposed and tested in this article for determining the structure of the working-age population by levels of education, which is optimal from the point of view of both meeting the current demand for personnel of a certain level of education, and creating conditions for the development of real sectors of activity. By comparing the structure of the population by education level with the levels of development of economic spheres of the OECD countries, characterized by the indicator of the level of their technological development, the optimal structure of the population by education level was determined, which corresponds to the achieved high values of indicators of the level of development of the economic sphere and their high growth rate. The structure of the population by the level of education for the Russian Federation is analyzed for its proximity to the optimal structure. It is shown that in comparison with the optimal structure, the share of people with higher education is significantly exceeded, which does not turn out to be a “positive” contradiction that stimulates development. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the proposal of a methodological approach to predicting the structure of the country’s population by the level of education, optimal in terms of meeting the needs of real sectors of activity, including compliance with the conditions for their development, which can be applied to countries with different levels of socio-economic development. The results of the work can be used in making decisions in the field of education.