A blog post from BEA Director Vipin Arora
I’d be willing to bet that the most effective and innovative places you’ve worked have had one thing in common: Great people. That’s certainly been my experience at BEA. While we make use of some remarkable technology, it’s really our people’s expertise and creativity—their human capital—that allows us to produce so many high-quality statistics.
Extending this logic to the entire economy is pretty intuitive: a more knowledgeable workforce can produce a greater quantity of goods and services than a less knowledgeable one. In other words, human capital is an important driver of economic growth. As you might expect, economists have emphasized that having a skilled workforce contributes to a nation’s economic success over the long run.
But just how important is human capital for growth? That turns out to be a hard question to answer—and it is the subject of a recent BEA working paper. The paper, which builds on many years of research into this topic, proposes an economic accounting framework that values human capital as an asset and tracks nationwide investment in, and stocks of, human capital over time.
The study is both interesting and important, and I encourage you to take a look. It provides fertile ground for continued research into the relationship between human capital and economic growth.