Introduction and Background

A sustainable development in different anthropological disciplines is essential for a better and safer future. So, the United Nations has set 17 goals in given disciplines that should make the world more sustainable in the coming years. As we can see on the website regarding the SDGs of the United Nations, both education and economic growth are among the goals mentioned.
It is now interesting to see how the two variables education and economic growth are related. Intuitively, it would make sense that a higher level of education of the total population would also increase its economic output, since a more educated population should also be more professionally efficient and productive.
Various studies have now investigated whether there is a direct correlation between government investment in the education sector and GDP per capita. However, the results are not always clear-cut. A clear correlation cannot always be established. This is mainly since the GDP per capita is tied to many variables. Nevertheless, most studies assume that a higher investment in education is by no means counterproductive to economic growth (Bloom, Canning and Chan, 2006; Lupu et al., 2018; Boutayeba and Ramli, 2019).
Another variable to measure the quality of a country's educational attainment is the number of people with a tertiary education in relation to the total population. Several studies find correlations with economic growth here. Often, poorer sub-Saharan countries are looked at, as they are more developed than modern developing countries, which have been providing good access to education for a long time (Chatterji, 1998; Bloom, Canning and Chan, 2006).
Studies in this area must always be observed over a period, so it is important not to limit the data to one point in time, but to analyse a development over several years.

Research Question and Methods

Using the literature, we found, we wanted to visually illustrate how investment in education affects economic performance. Developing countries could benefit from such a realization and catch up economically with the industrialized nations by increasing education spending. We used nation-states as the geographic parameters for the study. Which states were compared, depended on the availability of data for each state. As variables for education, we chose education spending as a percentage of total government spending on the one hand and the share of the adult population with a tertiary degree on the other. As additional evidence of the educational status of a country, we integrated the results of the Pisa studies since the year 2000. This is a good way to reflect the level of education of the population and to illustrate the impact of education spending. The above variables were now compared with the GDP per capita of each country. For illustration purposes, two maps were created to make the geographical differences immediately visible. Furthermore, a bubble chart diagram was created which allows three-dimensional comparisons of all variables. All graphics can be operated interactively by the user and were programmed with the help of the tool R-shiny.