The economic growth and human capital: the case of Visegrad countries
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Date
2013-08
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Technická Univerzita v Liberci
Technical university of Liberec, Czech Republic
Technical university of Liberec, Czech Republic
Abstract
Impact of education, more precisely impact of skills and knowledge (human capital) to increase individual productivity and wealth of nation, was already emphasized by classical economists. Comprehensive concepts of theory of human capital appeared in the early Sixties of 20th century. In the last two decades, the influence of human capital, more precisely influence of education on economic growth and productivity was confirmed by many economic studies. Human capital as an additional production factor is included in the new theories of economic growth. On the contrary, some experts criticize this unambiguous and inconclusive relation and some of them even disprove this hypothesis, publishing their studies. A lot of researchers expressed human capital as investment or expenditure in education, schooling enrollments or average length of education. In authors’ opinion, these variables do not seem to be appropriate indicators of human capital. This paper deals with the relationship of human capital and economic growth in Visegrad group countries during the period 1999-2010. We consider increasing in human capital will tend to economic growth and thus will contribute to improvement of national competitiveness. Because of the lack of observations the importance of human capital in the economic growth of these countries is being proven by using panel data analysis. The value of human capital is expressed by the graduates’ groups at the educational level, while economic growth is expressed by gross domestic product per capita. Annual data collected from Eurostat and converted into logs were employed. We found out the positive relationship between tertiary graduates and economic growth, on the other hand negative link between secondary graduates and economic growth.
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Subject(s)
economic growth, human capital, national competitiveness, panel data model
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978-80-7372-953-0