Human Capital and Growth: New Evidences from African Data

Dorothee Boccanfuso, Luc Savard and Bernice Elvire Savy

International Economic Journal, 2013, vol. 27, issue 1, 55-77

Abstract: Economic theory has 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.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10168737.2012.659276 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: HUMAN CAPITAL AND GROWTH: NEW EVIDENCES FROM AFRICAN DATA (2009)
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:taf:intecj:v:27:y:2013:i:1:p:55-77

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RIEJ20

DOI: 10.1080/10168737.2012.659276

Access Statistics for this article

International Economic Journal is currently edited by Jaymin Lee Editor

More articles in International Economic Journal from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().