Market access and regional dispersion of human capital accumulation in Turkey

Building on early advances in development economics, the theoretical construct of new economic geography asserts that geography plays a crucial role in educational human capital accumulation. Based on this expectation, this study investigates the impact of market access on provincial human capital accumulation in Turkey. Results indicate that market access matters for understanding why some regions lag behind others in terms of average years of schooling. Our results are robust to the inclusion of spatial mechanisms, different specifications of the spatial weight matrix, endogeneity and alternative measurements of market access and to a host of other factors that affect regional human capital accumulation.     

The effects of corruption on the human capital accumulation process: Evidence from Vietnam

This study aims to identify the effects of corruption on the human capital accumulation process in Vietnamese provinces/cities. I employ labour quality assessments of firms as a proxy for human capital and divide human capital accumulation into the following two processes: an educational process and a process through which educational outcomes and worker training transform into labour quality. The estimation results have some notable implications for the Vietnamese context. Corruption has both negative and positive effects on human capital. On the one hand, corruption reduces the positive effect of local government spending on educational achievements and worsens labour quality. On the other hand, the prevalence of corruption in provinces/cities increases the advantages of local schools in the competition to obtain funds from the central government; hence, corruption enhances educational achievements in those regions. The results of this study indicate that corruption adversely affects human capital overall.     

人力资本结构对经济增长贡献率的实证分析

建立人力资本结构对经济增长贡献率的计量模型,采用相关数据对该模型进行实证分析。结果表明：中等教育对我国经济增长的贡献率较高,高等教育相对较小。因此,建立模型分析不同受教育年限的人力资本对经济增长的贡献率就非常具有现实意义。     

How market access shapes human capital accumulation in a peripheral country: the case of Spain

Human capital endowment is one of the main factors influencing the level of development of a region. This article analyses whether remoteness from economic activity has a negative effect on human capital accumulation and, consequently, on economic development. Making use of microdata, this research proves that remoteness from economic activity can explain the differences in the level of education observed across Spanish provinces over the last 50 years. The effect is significant even when controlling for the improvement of education supply. Nonetheless, the accessibility effect has been petering out since the 1960s due to decreasing barriers to mobility.     

Unproductive labour,capital accumulation and profitability crisis in the Greek economy

The focus of this paper is on the evolution of the major macroeconomic variables of classical political economy and the contrast with their orthodox counterparts in the quest to identify the causes of the current crisis in the Greek economy. Our analysis shows that declining profitability past a certain point leads to a stagnant mass of real net profits that discourage investment and increase unemployment. More specifically, for the period 1970–2007 for which we have detailed data, we identify the so-called silent depression of the 1970s and early 1980s, the new golden age of accumulation during which the capitalization of the production process led to a rapidly growing productivity and with stagnant or slowly rising real wages increased the rate of surplus value to new heights. As a consequence, the rate of profit from the mid-1980s onwards displayed a mildly rising trend and remained at a much lower level than that of the early 1970s. The rate of profit starts to fall after 2007, the year of the onset of the (world) economic crisis, and this continues up to 2014. Our econometric analysis based on an ARDL model further shows that the incremental rate of return, a variable derived from, and therefore strictly related to the average rate of profit, constitutes a by far more concrete measure of profitability and, in combination with the real interest rate, shapes the process of capital accumulation.     

Learning outside the factory: a cliometric reappraisal on the impact of technological change on human capital accumulation

Abstract

The paper provides, a cliometric analysis on the impact of steam engine technology on the rise of adult education in nineteenth-century France. We exploit exogenous regional variations in the distribution of steam engines across France to evidence that technological change significantly contributed to the development of lifelong training during the 1850–1881 period. Our research shows that steam technology adoption in France was not deskilling. We argue that this process raised the demand for new skills adapted to the development of French industries.     

城镇化:经济可持续增长的新引擎——基于人力资本积累的角度

结合中国城镇化的特点,对贝克尔的人力资本模型和罗默的内生增长模型进行了调整,并以此为基础分析了城镇化通过人力资本积累影响经济增长的机制和作用效果. 研究发现,城镇化将从成本和收益两个方面影响人力资本投资决策,带来平均受教育年限的增加和人力资本专业化程度的提高,增加人力资本积累,并最终促进经济的可持续增长. 在此基础上,利用2005~2012年全国31个省份的面板数据对城镇化、人力资本积累与经济增长之间的关系进行了实证分析. 结果显示,通过人力资本积累这一途径,城镇化水平提高可以极大地促进经济增长.     

人力资本理性配置的制度因素分析

本文通过建立人力资本理性配置与经济增长间的关系模型,得出结论:低人力资本者和高人力资本者都可能成为价值侵蚀者.只有个体将知识和人力次本更多地配置到价值创造的生产性领域时,才能在降低增长成本而实现个人财富"理性增长"基础上实现整个社会经济的"和谐增长".本文的政策含义是:粗放型经济增长的根源在于"掠夺性激励制度"激发了人的"掠夺性侵蚀行为",如何纠正激励性制度偏差,降低价值侵蚀行为效率是实现成本节约基础上长期经济增长的关键.     

Income inequality and financial reform in Asia: the role of human capital

We investigate whether financial reform can reduce income inequality in Asia, with particular emphasis on the role of human capital. Extending Galor and Zeira (1993), we demonstrate that financial reform is effective in reducing income inequality, and the effect is more profound in a country with higher human capital. Using the data for 18 countries in Asia, the region with the most promising financial reform, we confirm our theoretical finding. In addition, among disaggregated financial reforms, lift of credit control, better banking supervision and security market development seem to be significantly associated with reduction of income inequality.     

农村人力资本高等教育投资的影响因素探析

高等教育阶段,影响农村人力资本投资的因素很多,包括农村居民收入的低水平循环增长、教育机会的不均等、农村家庭高等教育投资与收益的不对称和农村人力资本高等教育收益率较低等。     

增长失衡与政府责任:基于社会性支出角度的分析

There exists a kind of growth imbalance in China’s current development process, which is essentially characterized by the imbalance between the nation’s wealth and the people’s welfare. This paper points out that growth imbalance results mostly from insufficient government social spending on people’s welfare. Consequently, the government should shoulder the basic responsibility for the provision of education, health and social security, quicken the transformation of government expenditure structure and increase the share of social spending, in order to improve the people’s welfare and achieve the rebalancing of growth. The increase in social spending can also promote the accumulation of human capital, which will help the conversion of economic growth pattern and the realization of sustainable and healthy economic development. Translated from Jingji Yanjiu 经济研究 (Economic Research Journal), 2006, (10): 4–17     

Economic development,human capital and technical change: the question of machinery revisited

A systemic element of prevailing economic growth and development is the massive introduction of machinery into the production process. The introduction of new technologies became decidedly a debated issue in economic analysis because of the dual character of technology, which simultaneously creates and destroys employment, advances and deteriorates labor skills. This paper attempts to introduce the relative issues and to assess the extent to which the introduction of machinery into the labor process improves human capital or simplifies labor skills and forms a stream of unskillful laborers.

Cultural determinants of human capital accumulation: Evidence from the European Social Survey

Although economists commonly view the accumulation of human capital as a key driver of economic development, what drives cross-country differences in human capital accumulation remains poorly understood. I use an epidemiological approach involving second-generation migrants to test for a possible cultural gradient in individuals’ propensity towards human capital accumulation. Results indicate a strong relationship between country-of-origin culture and human capital accumulation and are robust to using years of education instead of individuals’ engagement in human capital accumulation as the dependent variable. Drawing on dimensions of cultural differences identified in culture frameworks developed by cross-cultural researchers, results further suggest that cultural emphasis on intellectual autonomy helps explain part of the observed differences in human capital accumulation. However, further work is needed to complete our understanding of the cultural roots of individuals’ propensity towards human capital accumulation.     

Environmental Markets vs. Environmental Deliberation: A Hayekian Critique of Green Political Economy

The article argues that in order to grasp fully Brazilian and Korean post-WWII developmental and growth experiences, it is first necessary to account for global-economy dynamics and the transformations in the International Division of Labour. These, together with local factors that particularly affect the objective conditions for the valorisation of capital in different productive sectors, explain the specific characteristics of capitalism in both countries. The article claims that capital has accumulated in Brazil and Korea under two different specific forms. In Brazil, capital has accumulated while producing on an internationally small-scale for domestic markets and compensating the resultant high production costs through the appropriation of a portion of the abundant ground-rent. While before the mid-1960s capital accumulated in Korea under that same specific form (though ground-rent was complemented with a portion of small agrarian capital profits and foreign aid), it afterwards began to do so through the production of specific industrial goods for world markets using the relatively cheap and disciplined labour-force available in the country. World-scale technological changes associated with computerisation and electronics-based automation have changed Korea's ‘competitive advantages’ as they resulted in sharp advances in the codification of technical knowledge and, thus, in the reduction of the tacit know-how and skills necessary to perform several labour processes. Though resulting in strong growth, these processes have created new contradictions and challenges for Korea which it may be incapable of overcoming.     

Career, experience and returns to human capital: is the dual labour market hypothesis relevant for the UK?

This paper investigates the relationship between career status, labour market experience and returns to human capital accumulation in the context of a two-tier, career and non-career labour market. Using micro data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), this study detects wage and employment mechanisms that differ between these two tiers of workers. The paper finds no support for the hypothesis of strict duality, by which the returns to education are expected to differ across labour market segments, with the returns in career employment being high and positive and the returns in the non-career sector being close to zero. The paper, however, finds support for significant returns to current tenure only in the career sector and also for the scarring hypothesis, according to which part-time employment and unemployment experience have a negative effect on participation and earnings in the career sector. Finally, there is evidence that only non-career earnings are significantly affected by local demand conditions, in contrast to earnings in the career sector. Career status is modelled as an endogenous variable subject to an initial job choice.     

A modest proposal for inclusion of women's household human capital production in analysis of structural transformation

Neoclassical economists posit a set of stylized facts which mark the structural transformation of national economies. Yet these facts, when disaggregated by gender, exhibit puzzling anomalies. For the 132 countries in our sample, female rates of economic activity are much lower than men's, and GDP per capita accounts for less than 16 percent of the variation in female rates. We argue that the missing female labor is occupied in a fourth sector – production and maintenance of human capital. Utilizing a series of heroic assumptions, the paper makes a first rough estimate of the value of this sector on a country-by-country basis.     

Two tales on human capital and knowledge spillovers: the case of the US and Brazil

This article uses a quasi-Mincerian approach to verify whether the concentration of college-educated individuals employed in the business support services sector and in the own sector contributes to increased productivity in other sectors of the economy. We estimate the returns to education using data from the 2008 US Current Population Survey (March supplement) and from the 2008 Brazilian household survey. This article finds evidence of a positive and significant human capital sectorial spillover effect, which is consistent with Acemoglu’s (1996) conjecture. The sectorial concentration of highly educated workers contributes to increase wages for all workers. This study also finds evidence of increasing returns to education in Brazil and diminishing returns to education in the United States. This finding may be explained by differences in supply of skilled workers in both economies. In addition, the short supply of highly skilled workers in Brazil likely explains the importance of the spillover effect from the business supporting sector.     

偏远地区小型企业社会资本的特征及积累路径分析

对我国中西部偏远地区众多小型企业社会资本形成和积累问题作了探讨。鉴于小企业发展是当地群众脱贫致富的重要途径,在投资和技术不足的条件下,社会资本形成和积累遂成为企业成长的基本动力。在对小企业社会资本的特征作出分析的基础上,着重提出应从企业和政府两个方面推进企业社会资本的积累和更新。     

Spillovers and absorptive capacity in the decision to innovate of Spanish firms: the role of human capital

This paper investigates whether the existence of knowledge spillovers and the capacity of firms to assimilate them, which we relate with R&D intensity and some human resource management practices, are associated with the decision to innovate of Spanish firms. In order to do this, we employ data from the ‘Central de Balances’ database, which covers both manufacturing and services firms during the period 2003–2007, and use an estimator proposed by Wooldridge [2005. Simple solutions to the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity. Journal of Applied Econometrics 20, no. 1: 39–54] for dynamic random effects discrete choice models. The empirical exercise provides evidence on the positive link between spillovers and the innovative behaviour of companies, not just for the knowledge generated in the same industry, but also for that generated in the same region or by the public sector. Moreover, this link is stronger for those firms with a higher capacity to absorb those spillovers. This ability not only works through firms’ R&D capabilities, but also through factors such as the quality of the labour force, the share of temporary employment and the amount of resources spent in training. In addition to these factors, we find that innovation performance exhibits a high degree of inertia. Further, some other observed firm characteristics, such as size, sales growth, export behaviour, sector capital intensity or financial structure variables, are also found to be relevant determinants of the likelihood of innovation.