Alexander - economic benefits

Investment in Early Childhood Education is actually a very strong investment. I actually think it has enormous returns for the children, for parents, for the economy and for society. I think it actually has very far-reaching benefits. 

And one of the things you look at, because it would come, you know a national program, would come with a very high price tag. One core question would be what’s the return on the investment going to look like. And there’s been a number of studies done and the literature is absolutely compelling that the rate of return is actually quite high. You know, the estimates range from everything from every dollar invested gives you a return of $1.20 all the way up to $3. And I think that what that demonstrates is that, while it is an expensive proposition, it can actually create enormous benefits to the economy and society as a whole. 

So, when we think about the benefits to children, we know that cognitive development starts immediately after birth. That means children are learning right away. Why did we decide the public education system would start at age five when in fact we know children start learning immediately. There’s benefits to the children. It helps their cognitive development and it helps their social development.  

It also brings very big benefits to parents. It reduces stress on parents. It helps work-life balance. It can also help increase labour participation. We’ve seen this in terms of Quebec where labour force participation amongst women increased measurably. 

By creating a more skilled group of individuals, you help to deal with core social issues like poverty. So you can actually tie Early Childhood Education and the benefits of Early Childhood Education to a lot of economic and social issues. And it can help you actually save money on those programs if you actually invest into children early. 

So people often wonder why a bank economist would be talking about Early Childhood Education. But in fact, it’s part of skills development and it’s about having the labour market that can meet the demands of the economy in the future. If you think about our economy, we ultimately are going to compete on the basis of our trained and skilled labour. You know, if we try to compete with places like China on wage costs, we’re going to lose. 

So, we need to build a better product. We need to be more innovative. We need to have a more productive economy. And you can’t have that without workers with effective skills. So, I’m a very strong advocate for literacy, for numeracy, for social skills development. And when I think about Early Childhood Education, it is about education. It’s about skills development. So, while it might be counterintuitive to have a banker talk about Early Childhood Education, in actual fact, this is an economic issue.