Studies on the economics of education in Greece

Abstract

Throughout the world today economists have spent considerable time at¬tempting to measure the economic contribution of education and trying to discover the meaning of today's education and its influence on the economic, sociological and political development of Nations. This discussion started before the 1950's, but there have been very few eco¬nomists who have looked upon human beings as capital. The meaning of education and its effects on economics was realized by the first economist-philosopher Plato. For Plato, education has high economic significance and a considerable part of the community's wealth must be invested in it. In his work, The Republic, he writes about the education and training of guardians, «...Their food, in the quantities required by men of temperance and courage, who are in training for war, they will receive from other citizens as the wages of their guardianship, fixed so that there shall be just enough for the year with nothing over....» Plato's «general» education was necessary for all citizens to be reasonable men. Although the economics of education has Plato's heritage, the idea of using the education to train the labor force for economic development is relatively new in modern Greece. The scope of this paper is to present a brief analysis of the existing work in the field of economics of education in Greece, and present the new developments in the field with a latest study about the «free» tuition higher education.