Education, Catch-up and Growth in Spain

Abstract

The debate over the impact of education on economic growth has recentlyled to disagreement when, at the empirical level, the effect of average humancapital on economic growth has been found to be weak. With this paper we revisitthese results by arguing how different educational attainment levels (rather than theaverage human capital stock) impact heterogenously different regions’ economicperformance. We build and test a catch-up model where technology adoption takesplace as a function of each region’s human capital composition. We show for 50NUTS3 Spanish provinces in between 1965 and 1997, how convergence to thefrontier is driven by higher education and, to a lesser extent, by vocational training.Both theoretical and empirical results are alternative to the well known formalizationproposed by Vandenbussche, Aghion and Meghir (2006). Severe endogeneityissues, as well as small sample biases, are tackled by using system GMM estimatorsand the correction proposed by Windmeijer (2005).

Keywords

• Human capital composition
• regional growth
• convergence
• adoption