Capitale umano, innovazione tecnologica e divari economici nell’era post-knowledge? Un’analisi econometrica a livello sub nazionale[Human capital, technological innovation and economic gaps in the post-knowledge era. A sub-national level econometric analysis]

During the last forty years there was a broad consensus in the academic literature that human capital is an important determinant of productivity and other economic outcomes, both at the individual and at the aggregate level, and that its role was particularly crucial to reduce regional growth disparities. Nowadays, although the production and use of human capital is at the core of value-added activities, innovation is at the core of firms’ and nations’ strategies for economic growth in a new “post-knowledge” era. Bearing this evidence in mind and using recent GMM-SYS panel data procedures, this paper presents a dynamic specification for the period 1970-2009 in which we used as dependent variable a proxy of Italian cross-country disparities in economic performance (such as the gap in the annual percentage growth rate of GDP between Italian regions and Germany, the innovation leader country) and indicator of innovation activity (such as the ratio of public and private R&D expenditure to gross fixed investments) and human capital (such as the ratio of people graduated in science and technology subjects to active people aged 25-64) as predetermined and endogenous variables. The results reveal that the well known North-South duality in terms of human capital differentials is always important spillover in defining regional competitiveness and economic growth, but in a world where information is ubiquitous and knowledge is increasingly shared, those regions located in an economic periphery that experience lower returns to skill attainment and hence have reduced incentives for human capital investments and agglomerations (like Sicily) have to look for new sources of advantage (such as R&D) to gain a competitive edge.