High-Tech Human Capital: Do the Richest Countries Invest the Most?
Author(s)
Sequeira, Tiago Neves
Abstract
In this paper we show that the richest countries are investing proportionally less than middle income countries in engineering and technical human capital. We generalize this result, controlling for country-specific effects, cross-time error correlations, heteroskedasticity, the presence of outliers and the introduction of other explanatory variables. Thus, we establish an unexpected stylized fact (about human capital composition): the proportion of high-tech human capital in tertiary education presents an inverted U-shaped relationship with GDP per capita. This is interesting because Research and Development (R&D) endogenous growth models predict, and most evidence shows, that investment in R&D increases with economic development.
