Education and Italian regional development

Abstract

Given recent emphasis on externality to education, macroeconomic studies have a role to play in the analysis of return to schooling. In this paper we study the connection between growth and human capital in a convergence regression for t he panel of Italian regions. We include measures of average, primary, secondary and tertiary education. We find that increased education seems to contribute to growth only in the South. Decomposing total schooling into its three constituent parts, we find that only primary education in the South seems to be important. The results thus suggest that the Italian growth benefited from the elimination of illiteracy in the South, mainly in the 1960s, but not from the substantial increases in education at the other levels. JEL Classification Number: I21

Human Capital Spillovers, Productivity and Regional Convergence in Spain

“…Specifically, Petrakis and Stamatakis (2002) report that primary and secondary education matter more for growth in less developed countries than they do in more developed economies, where higher education acquires greater importance. Similar results are found by Vandenbussche et al (2006) and by at the regional level is Di Liberto (2008). Turning her focus on Italy's regions, she reports that primary education seems to be important in the south, while tertiary studies have a negative impact on the country's northern regions.…”

“…The results are also robust in terms of the negative geographical spillovers from tertiary studies. A possible explanation for the negative effect of tertiary studies on a neighbouring region's growth (in a context of reduced geographical mobility of workers) is that the regions compete for highly qualified jobs in high added value sectors (Olejnik, 2008;Di Liberto, 2008). Fischer et al (2009) provide a complementary explanation for these negative spillovers: they argue that it is relative regional advantages in human capital that matter most for labour productivity so, ceteris paribus, if neighbouring regions increase their human capital, the region under consideration will find itself in a worse relative position.…”

Human Capital and Regional Wage Gaps

“…average years of schooling or the share of population with a certain educational attainment) in each region and some measure of aggregate economic activity, such as income or output per capita. In addition, previous studies have only considered the possibility that regional differences in levels of development and growth are due to different human capital endowments across regions (Rodríguez-Pose and Vilalta-Bufí, 2005;Di Liberto, 2008;López-Bazo and Moreno, 2008;Bronzini and Piselli, 2009). That is, no attention has been paid to the possibility that regional heterogeneity in the effect of human capital may be the cause of some of the economic disparities observed across regions.…”

Forming a Model of Cost Management in the Regional Scientific-Educational Cluster

“…As practice shows, the investment in human capital (Di Liberto, 2008) not only gives an effect mediated through the increase of financial assets, but also directly in the form of improving the company's image, prestige and reputation.…”