Abstract not found

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the growth effects of education and social capital. The main focus is on the crosscountry evidence for the OECD countries, but the paper also briefly reviews evidence from labour economics, to clarify where empirical work on education using macro data may be relatively useful. It is argued that on balance, the recent cross-country evidence points to productivity benefits of education that are at least as large as those identified by labour economists. The paper also discusses the implications of this finding. Finally, the paper reviews the emerging literature on the benefits of social capital. Since this

Abstract not found

Notes: Center Discussion Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussions and critical comments. Prepared for the African Economic Research Consortia meeting in Durban, South Africa, December 8, 2002. I have benefitted from the comments on an earlier version of this paper by

Abstract. We offer an extensive summary and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the impact of human capital on macro-economic performance, with a particular focus on UK policy. We also highlight methodological issues and make recommendations for future research priorities. Taking the studies as a whole, the evidence that human capital increases productivity is compelling, though still largely divided on whether the stock of education affects the long-run level or growth rate of GDP. A one-year increase in average education is found to raise the level of output per capita by between three and six percent according to augmented neo-classical specifications, while leading to an over one percentage point faster growth according to estimates from the new-growth theories. Still, over the short-run planning horizon (four years) the empirical estimates of the change in GDP are of similar orders of magnitude in the two approaches. The impact of increases at different levels of education appear to depend on the level of a country’s development, with tertiary education being the most important for growth in OECD countries. Education is found to yield additional indirect benefits to growth. More preliminary evidence seems to indicate that type, quality and efficiency of education matter for growth too.

This paper uses individual-level data to characterize economy-wide job creation and destruction during periods of massive structural adjustment. We contrast the gradualist Czech and the rapid Estonian approach to the destruction of the communist economy to provide evidence on selected macroeconomic theories of reallocation with frictions. We find that gradualism (slowing down job destruction) effectively synchronizes job creation and destruction. Drastic job destruction leads to little or no slowdown of job creation. Small newly established firms are the under-researched fountainhead of jobs during the transition from communist to market oriented economies. Tento článek využívá záznamů o zaměstnaneckých vztazích náhodného výběru pracovníků k charakterizování agregátního vývoje tvorby a zániku pracovních míst v průběhu masivní makroekonomické restrukturalizace. Cílem článku je využít srovnání gradualistické transformace v ČR s rapidní Estonskou

The papers in this series are to be regarded as the preliminary results of research

The program evaluation literature for population and health policies is in flux, with many disciplines documenting biological and behavioral linkages from fetal development to late life mortality, chronic disease, and disability, though their implications for policy remain uncertain. Both macro and micro economics seek to understand and incorporate connections between economic development and the demographic transition. The focus here is on research methods, findings, and questions that economists can clarify regarding the causal relationships between economic development, health outcomes, and reproductive behavior, which operate in many directions, posing problems for identifying causal pathways. The connection between conditions under which people live and their expected lifespan and health status refers to “health production functions”. The relationships between an individual’s stock of health and productivity, well being, and duration of life encompasses the “returns to health human capital”. The control of reproduction improves directly the well being of women, and the economic opportunities of her offspring. The choice of population policies may be country specific and conditional on institutional setting, even though many advances in biomedical and public health knowledge, including modern methods of birth

This paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences. It exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their relative human capital endowments without having to adjust for other sources of country-specific productivity differences. Based on such estimates, a neoclassical growth model with human capital is used to decompose crosscountry income differences into the contributions of physical capital, human capital, and total factor productivity. In U.S. data the earnings gap between immigrants and natives with identical measured skills is less than 25% for nearly all source countries, suggesting that cross-country differences in unobserved skills are much smaller than cross-country income gaps. As a result, the model strongly rejects the hypothesis that the bulk of income differences is due to physical and human capital. For a sample of countries with less than 40% of U.S. output per worker, human and physical capital account for only one-third of the income gap relative to the United States. Allowing for immigrant self-selection and skill complementarities increases this fraction to at most two-thirds. For the poorest 5 countries in the sample, this leaves income gaps of 350% unexplained. This evidence is consistent with Prescott's (1998) conclusion that accounting for cross-country income differentials requires a theory of total factor productivity.

Abstract not found