The Relationship Between ‘Higher Education and Training’ and ‘Business Sophistication’

Economics of education which investigates economic issues related to education - presents a framework which leads to better schedules and policy-making. On the other hand, the concept of competitiveness has drawn increasing attention of both scholars and governors in the past decade. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has published Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) in order to measure national competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interaction between the two sets of ‘Higher Education and Training’ (One of the pillars of GCI) and ‘Business sophistication’ both of which have been addressed by education of economics and not been profoundly investigated. To achieve the research aims, a descriptive correlational study has been used. The sample is 144 countries whose data were included in 2014-2015 report. Moreover, a canonical correlation analysis (CCA) has been employed to investigate the interaction between two sets of ‘Higher education and training’ and ‘Business sophistication’. The findings of the research revealed that a significant and positive relationship between two sets and more than 77.85% of changes in ‘Business sophistication’ can be predicted by changes in ‘Higher education and training’. In ‘Higher education and training’ sub-indexes ‘Local availability of research and training services’, ‘Extent of staff training’, ‘Internet access in schools’, and ‘Quality of management schools’ had the highest effect in creating this relationship.