The measurement of human capital: a multivariate macro-approach

We examine the human capital status of 123 countries by employing factor analysis on various national human capital indicators for the period 2000–2008 to construct two new measures. The first measure is based on advanced human capital, while the second is based on basic human capital. Our measures differ substantially from indicators used in previous studies on human capital and also lead to different rankings of countries. As rankings are not that informative without further information, we analyzed the distance between each country and the sample mean. Differences between countries are much more pronounced for our measure on advanced human capital than for our measure on basic human capital. Using cluster analysis, we classified the countries in four homogenous groups.