As part of his lecture on the topic of "The Knowledge of Capital Nation: The Role of Education for Economic Prosperity", Wößmann presented numerous results of his joint research with Eric A. Hanushek, Ph.D. He highlighted the importance of direct educational measures for explaining economic growth in an international comparison. He demonstrated that indirect indicators such as the average years of education can only explain about a quarter of the country-specific variance regarding economic growth. However, if actual educational performance, measured by tests in mathematics and science, is also integrated into the growth model, it will exert a statistically highly significant positive effect on economic growth. The country-specific variance can then be explained to almost three-quarters, while the average years of education no longer have an independent effect.

Following the presentation, the guests took advantage of the time left for a discussion of the predictive power of different indicators for the further development of economic growth as well as the methodological design and scaling of the tests used.