Regional gap in human capital: determinants of education and urbanization

Abstract

This paper studies the regional gap in human capital. Specifically, it focuses on the important determinants of this capital represented by such key factors as education and urbanization. We stress the importance of human capital for the economic growth and show how it can be important for the effective development of both urban and rural areas. This study examines the regional distribution and dynamics of human capital. Human capital is credited with a crucial role in the creation of economic growth. Additionally, we investigate how the exposure to the urban or rural environment affects the educational success of people worldwide. In addition, our paper studies the effects of migration on urbanization and education. Our results show that institutional factors can be a good proxy for explaining the relationship between human capital development and urbanization. Furthermore, it can be concluded that return to education is higher in urban areas compared to rural areas, and higher in highly educated cities compared to smaller towns. All of these creates some important implications for urbanization and education that can be used by the policy-makers and urban and rural planners for narrowing the regional gap in human capital and increasing the overall well-being and economic growth.

Does High-Tech Industry Agglomeration Promote Its Export Product Upgrading?—Based on the Perspective of Innovation and Openness

“…However, compared with regions with a high level of education, regions with a low level of education generally develop more slowly in high-tech industries, their industry agglomeration is basically in the primary stage, and export commodities have relatively low technical content [38]. Most of their export products are generally in the low end of the industrial value chain, and there is relatively large room for improvement [39]. Therefore, the improvement of technology will be obviously reflected in product quality or production efficiency.…”

Is increasing income the only reason for rural labor mobility?—A case study of Heilongjiang, China

“…There is not only the pull of the urban-rural wage gap and the push of insufficient rural resource endowments, which early development economists proposed (Lewis, 1954;Lee, 1966), but also the role of institutional reform dividends resulting from the gradual opening of urban and rural barriers (Zhang and Tian, 2018;Zhang et al, 2019). Laborers could leave to pursue increased income or better education for future generations, or be seeking labor opportunities in cities due to increased labor productivity in rural areas, reflecting the following contradictions, including the contradiction between better life needs for rural people and unbalanced urban-rural development (Lagakos, 2020;Guliyeva et al, 2021), the contradiction between rapid urbanization and inevitable rural decline (Li et al, 2018;Feng et al, 2019), and the contradiction between citizenization of rural labor and urban and rural barriers (Boffy-Ramirez and Moon, 2018;Colas and Ge, 2019). Therefore, it can still be asked what is the reason for the rural labor mobility-is it just for the increase of income-and what is the actual need for rural labor?…”