This article summarizes the arguments and counter-arguments in the scientific discussion on identifying the essential characteristics of human capital and key quantitative indicators of its evaluation. The article determined the evolutionary patterns of changing approaches to interpreting the essence of human capital. The study's main purpose is to form an integrated indicator of human capital assessment and identify the most relevant innovative drivers and inhibitors of its development. Systematization of literature sources and approaches to solving the human capital evaluation problem has shown a significant variation in both national approaches to solving the problem and their supranational counterparts. Given the lack of a unified approach to evaluating human capital, the article proposes an author's approach to solving the problem using the Fishburne formula and additive convolution. The relevance of the selection of normalized partial indicators to the integrated indicator is confirmed based on the Cronbach's alpha test. The composite human capital evaluation indicator includes several social, economic, and institutional indicators. Given the transformation of all components of the business environment and the national economy due to the formation of Industry 4.0, it is necessary to determine the most relevant innovative factors of human capital development. A sample of potential drivers and inhibitors of impact on the composite indicator of human capital evaluation, which have an innovative nature, is formed to achieve this goal. The panel data regression model was built. All calculations were performed using Stata 12/SE software product. Modeling results showed that most determinants of innovation development do not have a statistically significant impact on Human Capital Index and vice versa. Human Capital Index is positively influenced by information and communication technology exports but negatively influenced by the imports of computers, communications and services, and high-tech exports. At the same time, the growth of the Human Capital Index has a negative impact on the growth of the share of exports of computers, communications, and services in the structure of commercial imports and high-tech exports. The study results could be useful to scientists, public authorities, local governments, businesses, and entrepreneurs.
