 Is Bilingual Education Desirable in Multilingual countries?The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2022, vol. 22, issue 4, 889-949 Abstract: In many countries, people use their mother tongue in local business, but use the language of the former colonizer in national business. How much weight should be placed on teaching one’s mother tongue and the lingua franca is a critical issue in these countries. This paper develops a model to examine these issues theoretically. It is shown that balanced education of the two languages is critical for skill development of those with limited wealth. It is also found that balanced bilingual education yields higher earnings net of educational expenditure than lingua-franca-only education only when a country has favorable educational and technological conditions (productivity is reasonably high and education is reasonably effective) and only for those with adequate wealth. Policy implications of the results are also discussed. Keywords: language policy; bilingual education; human capital; economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:bejeap:v:22:y:2022:i:4:p:889-949:n:9 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter |
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