The Creative Class or Human Capital? - explaining regional development in Sweden

Abstract

Human capital is observed to be an important contributor to growth but unevenly distributed geographically. While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question of how best to measure human capital. Second, there is debate over the factors that yield the geographic distribution of human capital in the first place. We find that occupational or “creative class” measures tend to outperform educational measures in accounting for regional development across our sample of Swedish regions. We also find that universities, amenities or service diversity and openness and tolerance affect the distribution of human capital. A key finding is also that each of these factors is associated with a different type of human capital and thus they play complimentary roles in the geographic distribution of talent.

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