An Economic Perspective on the Notion of ‘Human Capital’

Abstract

Abstract This article opens by identifying two principal reasons for looking into the definition of human capital (HC). Defining HC broadly as the ‘skills, knowledge, and capabilities of the workforce’, it argues: first, that these are critical inputs to production; and second, that resources expended on increasing them are investments like more conventional investments in resources, facilities, and equipment. While a person's possessing ‘skills and knowledge’ is an old idea, the article argues that the recent history of HC is its rehabilitation as an additional variable to help explain economic growth not otherwise accounted for by conventional macroeconomic analysis. It reports that despite forty years of objections, HC has become central to macroeconomics, labour economics, growth theory, trade theory, development economics, the economics of education, the theory of the firm, human-resource management, and strategy theory – a very significant impact.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 69 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.