IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/csa/wpaper/2001-10.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Trade and human capital as determinants of growth

Author

Listed:
  • Måns Söderbom
  • Francis Teal

Abstract

Do openness to trade and higher levels of human capital growth promote faster growth? To answer that question we use a panel of countries to investigate the role of human capital and two measures of openness in determining both the level of income and its growth rate. We argue that focusing on the levels of income by estimating a production function will give misleading estimates if there are unobserved differences in the underlying growth of technical efficiency across countries that are correlated with the explanatory variables. Using a growth rate equation, where we allow for country fixed effects and for possible endogeneity of explanatory variables, we show that both measures of openness, one the Sachs-Warner measure which reflects policy, and one from the PENN World Tables, the share of trade in GDP, give similar results. We argue that openness has a highly significant and large effect on the underlying rate of growth of productivity, while human capital does not.

Suggested Citation

  • Måns Söderbom & Francis Teal, 2001. "Trade and human capital as determinants of growth," CSAE Working Paper Series 2001-10, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
  • Handle: RePEc:csa:wpaper:2001-10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ff94acab-b0db-487d-b487-86b6abf0df46
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marcel Fafchampsm & Måns Söderbom, 2006. "Wages and Labor Management in African Manufacturing," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 41(2).
    2. Marcel Fafchamps & Måns Söderbom, 2004. "Wages and Labor Management in African Manufacturing," Development and Comp Systems 0409043, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Belke Ansgar & Wang Lars, 2006. "The Degree of Openness to Intra-Regional Trade - Towards Value-Added Based Openness Measures," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 226(2), pages 115-138, April.
    4. Marcel Fafchamps & Mans Söderbom & Najy Benhassine, 2009. "Wage Gaps and Job Sorting in African Manufacturing," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 18(5), pages 824-868, November.
    5. Muhammad Akram & Syed Shabihul Hassan & Muhammad Farhan & Hassan Mobeen Alam, 2011. "Empirical Analysis of Determinants of Economic Growth: Evidence from SAARC Countries," Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies, AMH International, vol. 3(2), pages 115-121.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Productivity; openness; human capital and growth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F43 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - Economic Growth of Open Economies
    • O11 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:csa:wpaper:2001-10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Julia Coffey (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.