HUMAN CAPITAL AND GROWTH: NEW EVIDENCES FROM AFRICAN DATA

Dorothee Boccanfuso, Luc Savard and Bernice Savy ()
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Bernice Savy: GREDI, Faculte d'administration, Université de Sherbrooke

Cahiers de recherche from Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke

Abstract: Economic theory long acknowledged a positive relation between human capital and economic growth (Smith, 1776; Becker, 1964), which was nevertheless called into question in the late 1990s (Caselli et al. 1996; Pritchett, 2001). The two primary criticisms evoked were the failure to consider diminishing returns to education and qualitative aspects of the stock of human capital. This work aims to redress inadequacies in the literature related to the usual proxy of human capital by advancing a composite indicator of human capital (PCA). This indicator allows for an integration of the qualitative aspects in question and uses the indicator of the stock of human capital (Mincer, 1974) to take diminishing returns into consideration. Adopting the methodology developed by Islam (1995) allows for the impact of human capital to become positive once again in the process of economic growth. The data also reveal a conditional convergence process for the 22 African countries considered over the period 1970 to 2000.

Keywords: Economic growth; human capital; convergence; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O18 O47 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2009-12-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev, nep-fdg and nep-hrm
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http://gredi.recherche.usherbrooke.ca/wpapers/GREDI-0924.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Human Capital and Growth: New Evidences from African Data (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:shr:wpaper:09-24

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