Humankapital, politischer wandel und langfristige wirtschaftsentwicklung

Since the mid-1980s, growth theorists have increasingly focused on human capital as a source of long-run economic growth. Recently, however, a number of studies have documented that the social returns of human-capital investment are fairly small, implying that the contribution of human capital to economic growth is smaller than previously thought. In this article, I analyze the relationship between human capital and economic growth in the context of unified growth theory, which aims to explain the transition of countries from pre-industrial stagnation to modern economic growth. My main finding is that human capital matters for a successful transition from stagnation to growth not just because of the productivity effect of human capital that the existing literature has focused on, but also because human capital can serve as a trigger of political reforms, which in turn sustain and accelerate the transition to growth.