Human Capital in a Historical Perspective

Human capital can be defined as the set of knowledge and skills that individuals accumulate over time. These range from basic competences to more sophisticated forms of knowledge (intermediate and upper-tail human capital). All of them entail complex measurement problems in historical perspective as sources are often too scarce, problematic, and unreliable to allow proper measurement. Human capital is usually measured relying on the extensive margin of education or the quantity of education, that is, how many people are able to read or count or how many people have a certain degree of schooling. Less is known about the effective acquisition of skills, for example, the quality of education. Human capital can affect labor productivity and innovative capacity and it is generally regarded as one of the most important determinants of economic growth, figuring prominently in debates on the origin of the Industrial Revolution and the transition from preindustrial to modern economic growth. The determinants of education are several and vary widely over time and across space, including economic, institutional, cultural, and social factors. Historically, the acquisition of skills has deeply changed in nature, passing from the largely decentralized and fragmented systems of the preindustrial period to the 19th-century systems of mass education, where education was more and more universal and free, and the accumulation of skills was largely coordinated by states and other public authorities. In several regards, literature on human capital is still limited. Few efforts, for instance, have been made to harmonize data, integrate them in a comparative and regional perspective, explore the potential of individual-level information, and assess if and to what extent different dimensions of human capital such as technical and higher education have affected long-term patterns in economic growth and development. Other aspects have long been neglected or remain virtually unexplored, such as gender differences in education, the efficiency of education systems and its determinants, and the analysis of human capital in developing countries.