Economic Growth and The Quality of Human Capital

We calibrate an endogenous growth model to study the effect of the quality of human capital on productivity growth in a sample of thirty developed and developing countries for the period 1980 to 2007. We measure quality of human capital by relative cognitive skills. These are country scores in mathematics and science reported in Trends in International Mathematics and Science (TIMMS). The correlation between the relative quality of human capital and productivity growth is evident in the data for the developed countries. And, cross-country differences in the quality of human capital for a number of developed countries are highly positively associated with cross-country differences in productivity growth. The picture is significantly different for the developing countries in our sample