A Tale of Four Countries: Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in England, France, Scotland, and Spain: A Comparative Approach

Although subject to a long discussion, the idea that education has perceptible and positive economic effects is as old as the economic science itself. We can read clear references to it in Cantillon (1952 [1755], pp. 10–13), who sees the profit motive as the main reason for young people to get an education; and in Adam Smith (1937 [1776], p. 101), who wrote: ‘A man educated at the expence of much labor and time […] may be compared to one […] expensive machine’ and then went on to equate education with capital. John Stuart Mill (1900 [1848], pp. 104–10) linked ‘the productiveness of the labor of a community’ to ‘the skill and knowledge therein existing’ and bemoaned that ‘the economical value of the general diffusion of intelligence among the people [is] not yet […] well understood and recognized’. Other luminaries could be cited, among them Alfred Marshall (1927) and Frank Taussig (1925). Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of economic development (1934, first German ed., 1911) posited that ‘the fundamental phenomenon of economic development’ was technical progress. These ideas enjoyed a powerful stimulus when Robert Solow (1957) and Theodore Schultz (1960), from very different methodological approaches, showed with glaring evidence the economic value of education and human capital, an expression which became common at around the time Solow and Schultz published their pathbreaking works.