HUMAN CAPITAL, INNOVATION CAPABILITY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

In this paper, we study human capital effects on economic growth of Portugal from 1960 to 2001. By using VAR and cointegration analyses, we obtain 0.42 long-run estimate for human capital elasticity, 0.30 long-run estimate for internal knowledge elasticity, and 0.40 long-run estimate for the elasticity related with the composite variable that measures the interaction between human capital and innovation capability. These estimates seem to confirm that human capital and indigenous innovation efforts are enormously important to the process of Portuguese economic growth during the period 1960-2001, though the relevance of the former overpasses that involving the creation of an internal basis of R&D. In addition, the indirect effect of human capital, through innovation, emerges here as critical, showing that a reasonably higher stock of human capital is important to enable a country to reap the benefits of its innovation indigenous efforts