An Agent-Based Model That Relates Investment in Education to Economic Prosperity

摘要

This paper describes some experiments with an agent-based model designed to capture the relationship between the investment that a society makes in education in one generation, and the outcome in terms of the health of the society's economy in ensuing generations. The model we use is a multiagent simulation derived from an equation-based model in the economics literature. The equation-based model is used to establish parameterized sets of agent behaviors and environmental characteristics. Agents are divided into three chronological categories: students, adults and pensioners; and each responds to and affects the environment in different ways, in terms of both human and physical capital. We explore the effects of different parameter settings on the education investment of a society and the resulting economic growth.