The purpose with this paper is to examine if tertiary education and democracy have an impact on economic growth. In order to decide how democratic the examined countries are the democracy index constructed by The Economist is used. Besides the two central theories the purpose is also to explain why these variables could affect growth and to examine direct and indirect effects. Indirect effects mean that one variable affects another variable which thereafter has an impact on economic growth. 34 OECD countries are compared in order to investigate whether education and democracy are strongly correlated with BNP per capita. Therefore a statistical design is used as method. The empirical results suggest that there is significant correlation between democracy and economic growth. Educational levels seem to have a very small and insignificant effect on economic growth. The empirical results also indicate that the small effect that educational levels have on growth can to a great extent be explained by corruption. This means that countries with higher educational attainment have a tendency to be less corrupt which in turn leads to higher economic growth. The significant and positive correlation between democracy and economic growth can to some extent be explained by the indirect effect which is corruption.