Capital Humano, Progresso Técnico E Crescimento Econômico: Um Reexame Empírico Das Abordagens De Acumulação, Inovação E Difusão Tecnológica

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of human capital on economic growth according to Nelson-Phelps (1966), Lucas (1988) and Romer (1986;1990) approachs. The Lucas approach and shared by neo-classical growth theory, assumes that growth is driven by the accumulation of human capital. It treats human capital like an ordinary input in the production function generating increasing returns of scale.Nelson and Phelps approach relates growth to the stock of human capital which affects a country´s ability to innovate and catch up which more advanced countries. According to Romer, human capital may directly influence productivity by determining the capacity of nations to innovate new technologies suited to domestic production. The analysis is performed on a panel of the 68 countries with differents levels of economic development and it was made separately to groups of countries classified by the World Bank like rich, medium income and poor countries. We use the stochastic production frontier analysis and the Malmqüist Index to separate the effects caused by gains in technological progress (displacement of the frontier) from the effects produced by enhanced efficiency (catching up with the frontier). The results obtained show that human capital factor contribute to the economic growth in differents ways like these ones above- mentioned.