Human capital and growth: the recovered role of educational systems

Abstract. Recent empirical studies question the conventional wisdom on the importance of education for growth. This result comes partly from the fact that international differences in the quality of the educational system defined by its capacity to produce one marginal unit of productive human capital are not taken into account. We estimate neo-classical growth models on panel data in which the elasticity of human capital depends stochastically on different characteristics of the educational system. Several of these characteristics explain the quality differences, such as the educational infrastructures, the initial endowment of human capital and the ability to distribute equally educational services within the population