The Role of Human Capital in Economic Development:Evidence from Taiwan

Abstract

The use of Taiwanese industrial data to investigate two potentially important roles of human capital on long-run economic growth (i.e. factor accumulation and technology progress), we find that human capital accounts for 46% of output growth in aggregate manufacturing industry and from 23 to 84% in two-digit industries. Significant knowledge spillover effects were found within Taiwan`s manufacturing sector. For aggregate manufacturing, a roughly 29% of total rate of return to education gives a private return of 7% while the external knowledge spillover effect is 22%. For the two-digit industries, the inter-industry effect of education measures two to three times its intra-industry effect. Contrary to the Lau-Young proposition, we find that technology change in terms of knowledge spillover contributes 39% to the output growth of Taiwan`s aggregate manufacturing and from 12 to 42% to that of the two-digit industries. Our results also suggest that, in the presence of externalities, growth accounting based on macro data may be misleading in interpreting the sources of growth.