The Farthest Needs the Best. Human Capital Composition and Development Specific Economic Growth

In this study we provide robust and compelling evidence of the larger effect of tertiary education on the growth of less developed countries and of the relatively smaller impact on the growth of developed ones. This argues for the accumulation of high skills especially in technologically under-developed countries and, contrary to the common wisdom, independently of the fact that these economies might be initially producing low(er)-technology goods or performing technology imitation. Our results are robust to the different measures used to proxy for human capital and to the adjustment for cross-country differences in the quality of education. Country-specific insitutional quality, as well as other various indicators such as the legal origin, the religious fractionalization and openness to trade have been used to control for the robustness of the results. They are also shown to speed up technology convergence confirming previous empirical literature. Our estimates tackle endogeneity by applying a variety of techniques such as IV (both panel and cross-section) and two-step efficient system GMM.