In: Economics
If a very few resources are currently commited to education then an increase in resources used can bring relatively large gains to education.
The above pattern of using resources is based on the law of
diminishing returns. According to this law, when there are
additional increment of resources for a certain purpose, the
marginal benefit out of those additional increments will decline.
For example, take the production possibility frontier to explain
the effect of additional resources on education, where education is
shown on the horizontal axis. The production possibility frontier
depicts that when additional resources are added to education,
moving from left to right along the X-axis, the initial gains are
fairly large, but it decreases gradually.
In order to find out the gains from committing additional marginal
resources to education, we need to find out how much is already
spent on education. If very few resources are currently commited to
education, then an increase in resources used can bring relatively
large gains. Similarly, if a large amount of resources is already
committed to education, then committing additional resources will
bring relatively smaller gains.