The linkage between Human capital development and economic growth

Human capital is a necessary condition for economic growth. While in the past, much effort focused on expanding access, we now understand that human capital is much more than educational attainment .Skills acquisition and the capacity to continue learning throughout the lifecycle are needed to develop individuals and to foster the rise in productivity needed for economic growth. The main objective of this study is to analyse the extent to which education level of a county s labour force affects its economic growth that is output level.A Cobb-Douglas production function with constant returns to scale is used where Human capital is treated as an independent factor of production in the human capital augmented growth model.We further employ an error correction model which combines long-run information with a short-run adjustment mechanism in order to remove biased coefficient estimates.The main results shows that higher levels of human capital directly influence productivity via its impact on domestic innovation. Secondly, higher levels of human capital cause improvements in total factor productivity by facilitating the adoption and implementation of foreign technology.

Autorentext

Mrs Sheereen Fauzel is an educator and also involved in part time lecturing at universities. Her areas of expertise are finance, banking and economics. She has participated in international conferences and is also active in writing academic articles. She is currently working on a doctoral thesis in the field of Foreign direct investment.