Capital humano local y productividad en las provincias espanolas

In the last decade, different studies have tried to contrast empirically the existence of a relationship between local human capital and the productivity of a given territory, and the possible presence of external economies. The most common result has been the finding of a positive relationship between both variables. However, there is no difference when trying to explain this result: a first group of authors remark the role of external economies associated to human capital, while a second group believes in the rellevance of complementary relationships among the different productive factors and, in particular, among human and physical capital. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the existence of a possible relationship between the stock of human capital in the Spanish provinces (NUTS-III) and their productivity, and next, find out if the channel of transmission is related to external economies. For this reason, a two-stage methodology is applied. In the first stage, a Mincer equation is estimated using information from the Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares (Family Budget Survey) to obtain estimates of the average productivity of the Spanish provinces once the effect of individual human capital is controlled. In a second stage, the estimates of territorial productivity is introduced as the endogenous variable in a new equation where explanatory variables try to reflect the stock of human capital at every province. From this second regression, a positive relationship is found. However, the main conclusion of the paper is that this relationship cannot be explained by the impact of exogenous local human capital external economies, but by other demand factors.