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This paper explores the system-wide impact of graduates on the regional economy. Graduates enjoy a significant wage premium, often interpreted as reflecting their greater productivity relative to nongraduates. If this is so there is a clear and direct supply-side impact of higher education institution (HEI) activities on regional economies. We use an HEI-disaggregated computable general equilibrium model of Scotland to estimate the impact of the growing proportion of graduates in the Scottish labour force that is implied by the current participation rate and demographic change, taking the graduate wage premium in Scotland as an indicator of productivity enhancement. While the detailed results vary with alternative assumptions about the extent to which wage premia reflect productivity, they do suggest that the long-term supply-side impacts of HEIs provide a significant boost to regional GDP. Furthermore, the results suggest that the supply-side impacts of HEIs are likely to be more important than the expenditure impacts that are the focus of most HEI impact studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing each of the higher education institutions (HEIs) as a separate sector in the Scottish input-output table suggests that their expenditure patterns are homogenous and that any apparent heterogeneity in their conventional demand impacts depends primarily on scale. However, a disaggregation of their income by source reveals a disparity in their degree of dependence upon funding from the devolved Scottish Government. Acknowledging the binding budget constraint of the Scottish Government, and deriving balanced-expenditure multipliers, reveals large differences in the net-expenditure impact of HEIs upon the Scottish economy, with the source of variation being the origin of income. Applying a novel treatment of student expenditure impacts through identifying the amount of exogenous spending per student further increases the heterogeneity of the overall expenditure effects. These issues have particular importance for many governments facing increasing pressure to reduce their overall budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]