Estimating the human capital stock for Cape Verde, 1950-2012

Despite the importance of human capital stock to the economic growth of countries, its analysis has been restricted to more developed countries or to cross-country samples from a set of countries. Due to a lack of estimates for this variable in less developed countries, it has not been possible to assess the importance of this determinant for their growth and development. The aim of this study is to partly fill this gap, determining human capital stock in terms of average formal schooling for the Cape Verdean economy in the period 1950-2012. To this end, we resorted to an adaption of the methodology proposed by Barro and Lee (1993), based on past schooling values. We found that between 1950 and 2012 the Cape Verdean working-age population showed a gradual improvement in the levels of schooling, rising from 0.7 years of schooling in the 1950s to 5.4 in late 2012. However, this means that, in each year, the average years of schooling increased only 0.08 years, meaning that, in net terms and on average, only 7.6% of the working-age population was attending some level of formal education. The availability of a time series of number of average schooling years in Cape Verde opens up possibilities for assessing the impact of human capital on the country’s economic growth.