The Demography of Educational Attainment and Economic Growth

Income convergence prospects in Europe: Assessing the role of human capital dynamics

“…The resulting estimated reduced specification is the model that is used for the income projection exercise in the next section and highlights the importance of physical and human capital investment as drivers of economic growth in our sample of European countries. In particular, the productivity, innovation and technology adoption effects of secondary and tertiary education appear particularly important to understand the economic growth and convergence patterns observed in Europe in the last four decades, a result which is in line with those in, for example, Lutz et al (2008), which uses the same human capital database but a global sample of countries.…”

“…This implies that it is the accumulation of human capital (that is, the growth rate of labour input with higher educational attainment level) which is related to improvements in growth rates of total output and thus level effects in income per capita (see Mankiw et al (1992) for a seminal exogenous growth model with such a theoretical framework). In the spirit of the Nelson-Phelps paradigm (see Nelson and Phelps (1966), Benhabib and Spiegel (1994) and Lutz et al (2008)), we assume that the role of education as an engine of economic growth goes beyond labour productivity improvements and that the stock of human capital also plays the role of a catalyst of technology improvements through its effect on innovation and technology adoption. In consequence, we follow Benhabib and Spiegel (1994) and assume that the growth rate of total factor productivity depends on (a) the distance to the technology frontier, as approximated by the income per capita level of the respective country, (b) the proportion of the workforce with tertiary education, which is used to proxy for the technology innovation potential of the economy and (c) the interaction between the level of income per capita (i.e., the distance to the technology frontier, and the share of working age population with tertiary education, which accounts for technology adoption as a driver of income convergence.…”

Green Returns to Education: Does Schooling Contribute to Pro-Environmental Behaviours? Evidence from Thailand

“…Indeed, it has been widely accepted that education is fundamental to the process of economic growth and development (Klasen, 2002;Lutz et al, 2008;Mankiw et al, 1992). Not only does it contribute towards productivity improvement (Schultz 1998;Orazem and King 2008), it is also fundamental to other factors determining development such as health (Cochrane et al, 1982;Kippersluis et al, 2011), fertility (Osili and Long, 2008;Wolpin and Todd, 2006) and civic participation (Castelló-Climent, 2008;Dee, 2004;Glaeser et al, 2007).…”

Human Capital and Sustainability

“…In Hungary that figure rises to 117% [72]. Recent demographic studies confirm that education at all levels is the key driver of economic growth in both high and low income countries [73].…”