How higher education institutions contribute to the growth in regions of Europe?

Abstract

Various studies show that higher education institutions contribute to regional economic development by R&D, creation of human capital, knowledge and technology transfer, and by creation of a favourable milieu. It is brought out that the basic procedure is to sum expenditures of the college community (students, faculty, staff and visitors) created by the presence of the institution and apply multipliers to account for the interdependency of economic activity in a local economy, resulting in an estimated 'local economic impact'. The aim of the paper is to investigate the relationship between students in tertiary education and economic growth in NUTS 2 level in Europe from 1998 to 2008 by looking whether the share of tertiary students (measuring human capital) is correlated with the share of knowledge-intensive employment (KIE) in different regions. The increase in KIE is related to increasing levels of GDP per capita and R&D expenditures. Taking into account regional-level fixed effects, the share of tertiary students is not statistically significant. We found out that the increase in KIE is related to increasing levels of GDP per capita and R&D expenditures. The share of students five periods ago has a positive relation with the KIE: as we assumed, it takes time for the human capital to contribute to the economic development.

Applying an Evolutionary Growth Theory for Sustainable Economic Development: The Effect of International Students as Tourists

“…A different perspective was presented in a very recent research which focused on (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, secondary level) NUTS-II Level European countries to see how the higher education institutions contributed to growth in the region between 1998 and 2008 [71] focusing on tertiary students. This empirical study showed a robust statistical significance relation among knowledge-intensive employment and research and development expenditures.…”

Assessing economic impact and efficiency of higher education institutions

“…Over the past decade, attention has turned to understanding the contextual factors that smooth over and/or disrupt the relationship between HEI activity and economic outcomes (Lilles & Rõigas, 2017). A key factor that has emerged is the external framework conditions surrounding the HEI, and specifically, their position within their local and regional ecosystem.…”

“…Blackwell, Cobb and Weinberg (2002) note that the popularity of this approach from the 1970s to the 1990s can be attributable to a white paper issued by the American Council of Education that advocated for a tailored approach to estimating economic impact. However, as noted by Guerrero, Urbano, and Cunningham (2016), this approach was also long popular in the European context (see also, Lilles & Rõigas, 2017). As with case studies more generally, the advantage of this approach lies in the ability of the researcher to gather a broad range of input data (e.g., student numbers and HEI expenditures) and to attempt to relate to observable economic outputs.…”

Industry Academia Collaboration in the Context of Open Innovation: Empirical Evidence from Pakistan

“…Industrial knowledge enrichment, resource attainment, institutional motives, research propensity, cost reduction, process time optimization and specialized technology are some of the cooperation outcomes (Galan Muros et al, 2017). Academia provides stewardship in generating knowledge, linking with customers and fostering technological transfer (Gulbrandsen et al, 2007;Lilles et al;. Also, commercialization is an important factor for estimating impact of academic collaborative efforts (Markman et.al., 2008).…”