Review of the Relation between Education and Sustainable Socio-Economic Development in the EU through Canonical Correlation Analysis

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reveal the importance of education in achieving sustainable socio-economic development. For this purpose, the relation between education and socio-economic development indicators in the European Union was investigated. The method used was canonical correlation, one of the multivariate analysis techniques. The reason why this method was chosen is that it enables simultaneous review of two different variable sets and testing of the significance of correlations between data sets. The reason why this study is important and original is that while most of the studies focus on the impact of education on growth, this paper will mainly analyse the relation between “economic, social, political, cultural and educational socio – economic development” and “education”. Analysis results show that there is a strong and statistically significant relation between variable sets both before and after expansion. It can be said that education is a good criterion with regards to socio-economic development indicators for the European Union.

Keywords: European Union, Education, Sustainable-Socio Economic Development, Canonical Correlation, Canonical Variable.