The Role of Human Capital and Technological Interdependence in Growth and Convergence Processes: International Evidence

Cem Ertur and Wilfried Koch ()

DEGIT Conference Papers from DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade

Abstract: This paper develops a bisectorial growth model with physical and human capital accumulation. Each sector is characterized by a different technology involving different human capital parameters. The model includes human capital externalities together with technological interdependence between economies. It leads to a spatial autoregressive reduced form for the real income per worker at steady state. The structural parameters of the model are recovered and evidence of the insignificance of human capital in explaining per capita growth, that is the human capital puzzle, is reconsidered. In fact, the parameter related to human capital in the consumption good sector is low which is consistent with evidence presented in the growth accounting framework. In contrast it is indeed higher in the education sector. Our model leads to spatial econometric specifications which are estimated on a sample of 89 countries over the period 1960-1995 using maximum likelihood as well as Bayesian estimation methods, which are robust versus outliers and heteroskedasticity. This model yields a spatially augmented convergence equation characterized by parameter heterogeneity. A locally linear spatial autoregressive specification is then estimated providing a different convergence speed estimate for each country of the sample.

Keywords: Conditional convergence; technological interdependence; spatial autocorrelation; parameter heterogeneity; locally linear estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C21 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60 pages
Date: 2006-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://degit.sam.sdu.dk/papers/degit_11/C011_029.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to degit.sam.sdu.dk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:deg:conpap:c011_029

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DEGIT Conference Papers from DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jan Pedersen ().