Human Capital, The Digital Divide, And The Possible Connection To The Flow-Fund Analysis Of Socioeconomic Metabolism

Poverty and economic growth are interconnected research fields via the standard concept ‘human capital’ and in modern societies their analysis is intertwined. In the past decades, more and more research has considered modern economies as complex systems embedded in the biosystem. Under this assumption, scenario analysis based on the concept of socioeconomic metabolism is used to complement more traditional forecasting methods. Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) is developed on the framework of Georgescu-Roegen’s 'flow-fund' model of production and it characterizes socioeconomic systems as metabolic systems. In the context of this novel approach, concepts like bio-economic pressure enable scenario analysis for the evolution of the whole or partial socioeconomic system. The Human Activity Fund is a concept central to the socioeconomic metabolic flow-fund framework and it is related, besides human capital, to one of the newest sources of inequality, namely the ‘digital divide’. The digital divide is a result of the IT Revolution and recent research has associated it with the ‘rewiring of the human brain’. This paper introduces the concept of human capital and presents some of the measures employed in the literature. It also investigates the possible change, due to the digital divide, in the metabolic pattern of a society associated with ‘quality’ changes of the Human Activity Fund through demographic structure or poverty pattern alterations. The ‘internet illiteracy’ indicator is used as a first step to investigate the connection between the MuSIASEM concept Human Activity Fund and the standard concept Human Capital