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This paper explores the spatial heterogeneity in the human capital potential of Indonesia's next generation by constructing and analyzing sub-national human capital indices (HCI) for 34 provinces and 514 districts in Indonesia. The paper identifies data and methodological constraints in the construction of these sub-national indices and proposes and implements strategies to overcome these challenges. Several interesting findings emerge from the analysis. First, Indonesian's young generation can only achieve 53% of their future productivity relative to the full benchmark of health and education. Second, the variation in aggregate human capital potential across space in Indonesia is staggering: some parts of country are almost at par with countries like Vietnam and China while others have human capital levels that are comparable to Chad, Niger, and Sierra Leone. Third, differences in learning outcomes as measured by harmonized test scores account for the largest share of the variation in human capital across Indonesia, suggesting that the challenge of providing quality education remains one of the most important obstacles to equalizing opportunities for the next generation of Indonesians. And fourth, the correlation between government spending and performance on HCI at the district level appears rather weak, reinforcing conclusions reached by other recent studies that have highlighted the importance of focusing on the quality of spending. Finally, this paper also shows that Indonesia's human capital registered a modest improvement from 0.50 in 2013 to 0.53 in 2018 with stronger progress observed among the already top performing provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether parents' entry into unemployment affects investment in children's education through their decision to provide public or private education for their children. The empirical approach makes use of longitudinal data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios Contínua–PNAD contínua) and propensity-score matching with difference-in-difference methods. According to estimates, parents' unemployment reduces the probability of children's enrollment in the private educational system, which usually has better quality but high costs, instead of in the public educational system, which is offered for free but typically has poor quality. Thus, evidence suggests that reductions in household income as a consequence of unemployment can have impacts on the quality of human capital accumulated by children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 10 to investigate the role of quality institutions in the human capital-income inequality nexus. It uses an unbalanced panel data on the Gini index (measure of income inequality), human capital index and institutional quality index on 46 sub-Saharan African countries from 2010 to 2019. The Driscoll and Kraay (Rev Econ Stat 80:549–560, 1998) panel spatial correlation consistent (PSCC) and Firpo et al. (Unconditional quantile regressions. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, No. 339, pp 1–54, 2007. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA6822) bootstrap unconditional quantile regression (UQR) techniques are deployed. Among others, findings reveal that: (1) human capital and institutions aggravate inequality; (2) the interaction of human capital and institution reduce inequality; (3) UQR reveals that the interaction effect is negative at lower quantiles of 0.10, 0.25 and 0.50; and (4) results across the sub-regions are mixed. In addition, evidence from the margin plots reveals that the conditional effect of human capital on income inequality is negative as institutions are strengthened. The downward trend of the plot within the 95% confidence interval shows that institutional quality enhances the impact of human capital on income inequality. These are novel contributions to the literature as it suggests that quality institutions matter in the drive towards reducing the menace of income inequality. Policy recommendations include strengthening institutions and making basic education affordable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the value that employers assign to immigrants' labour market experience, from both before and after immigration, using a surveyed representative sample of the Swedish immigrant and native populations. A novel feature of the survey is that it contains a measure of immigrants' actual years of labour market experience, including about work before immigration. Previous research has, in contrast, relied on so-called potential measures, risking bias in the analyses. For immigrants, results show that only pre-immigration labour market experience from the Nordic countries has a positive return. Results also show that return to labour market experience after immigration does not depend on whether the individual acquired Sweden-specific human capital before or with the entry into the labour market. Natives and immigrants, as well as immigrants with and without schooling or upbringing in Sweden, have parallel wage trajectories across labour market experience years, with immigrants being at a stable disadvantage. This is interpreted to be caused by immigrants being sorted into jobs with worse opportunities to acquire new human capital compared with natives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a novel panel dataset on recent immigrants in Switzerland, we study the relationship between the degree of skills utilization, the foreign-acquired education and its certification in the host country. We find that the relationship with foreign education is negative, especially when acquired in a non-EU country, in line with the literature documenting the imperfect international transferability of human capital. Obtaining a "Certificate of Equivalence" in Switzerland makes this relationship statistically non-significant: in other words, the certification enables immigrants to enjoy the same degree of skills utilization in the Swiss labour market as those with Swiss education. Additional results suggest that immigrants with a foreign but not Swiss-certified education keep the degree of skill utilization as high as it would be if they were Swiss educated when they obtain a job contract or job offer before migrating to Switzerland. These findings are robust to controlling for self-selection on unobserved characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a multidimensional analysis grid to assess regional disparities, transcending monetary considerations. This grid agrees overall with the common framework that prevails in the literature review that we have carried out. It is built around four dimensions of well-being: economy (development, labor market, human capital and innovation), social (health, living conditions and gender), environment and governance. Our analysis of regional disparities was based on the synthesis of fifteen indicators by constructing a Synthetic Index of Well-being (SIWB) by combining its four dimensions using an aggregative-compensative approach. This analysis covers Morocco, 35 of the OECD member countries and their 389 regions between 2000 and 2019. We have assessed the dynamics of Moroccan regions compared to those of the benchmark. Thus, we have highlighted the gaps to be made up in relation to the different areas of well-being as well as their thematic variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union and the whole world are facing the problem of increasing income and wealth inequalities at the country and regional levels. Inequalities are a severe obstacle to sustainable and balanced growth. Politicians perceive this problem by trying to implement different types of development models. The cohesion policy is the European Union's response to the development differences between countries and regions. It is clearly defined that development has to be sustainable and inclusive, which is reflected in the objectives of all leading EU development strategies. The aim of this paper is (1) to examine how effective the EU cohesion policy is in reducing regional disparities (2) to assess that the main cause of regional disparities is the misallocation of human capital. The authors base their study on the regions of Poland, estimating the state of their human capital and innovation between 2004 and 2018. We examine the effectiveness of cohesion policy using functional data analysis—the Wilcoxon test, which was used for the first time for this type of issue. The current question is whether to help metropolises and large cities, which will entail the development of smaller units, or whether to try to increase the rate of development of smaller and economically weaker territorial units in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence shows that economic advantages and disadvantages tend to be hereditary, generating a positive association between income inequality and intergenerational immobility. This relationship, "the Great Gatsby Curve," is explained in this article in relation to welfare regimes. Compared to Liberal and Nordic welfare regimes, Conservative welfare regime generates the highest level of intergenerational immobility. Multilevel analysis of data from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP2009) supports that Conservative regime is the strongest to keep the influence of parental backgrounds on children's wealth which is the key to determine children's socio-economic status. These findings, combined with the fact that the conservative welfare regime generates a medium-high level of economic inequality, explains why income inequality is positively and concavely correlated with intergenerational immobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human capital is a complex concept to measure given it is an unobserved latent construct. Education is a fundamental dimension of human capital and thus an education-based approach is the one most widely used. However, the international literature recommends a latent-variable approach to measuring human capital. This study thus aims to measure human capital in South Africa, a country experiencing extreme earnings and education inequalities, using a latent-variable approach and the National Income Dynamic Study (NIDS) dataset. The findings are that parental education is associated with the largest amount of variance in (latent) human capital, while the health indicator captures the least variance. Furthermore, the (latent) human capital variable provides a valuable measure to profile the distribution of human capital by socioeconomic subgroups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current society, institutional quality is essential to innovation activity, as formal and informal institutions have a positive impact on innovation. Formal institutional quality establishes the intellectual property rights culture that lowers the transaction costs, required to stimulate the innovation process. Strengthen informal institutions inseminate mutual trust and cooperation, necessary to share the previous knowledge, which is mandatory to invent new ideas. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effect of formal and informal institutions and their indicators on innovation activities. We construct the indices to measure the quality of formal and informal institutions using data on 73 countries for the period 1981–2014. The system GMM estimation technique is used to predict the performance of formal and informal institutions on innovation activities. Besides, this study estimates the effect of each indicator of formal as well as informal institutions on innovations after controlling for FDI, human capital, trade and government size. The hypotheses of positive effects of formal and informal institutional quality is accepted. The size of the effect of different indicators of institutions are varying. The results are robust across developed and developing countries. From a policy perspective, this study suggests that more focused monitoring of institutions is required to improve their quality that ultimately effects innovation activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social outcomes from conservation and development activities on a local scale are often assessed using five livelihood assets—Natural, Physical, Human, Financial and Social—and their associated indicators. These indicators, and the variables used to measure them, are typically based on ‘common practice’ with limited attention being paid to the use of alternative indicators. In this article, we present a typical survey of socioeconomic benefits for ecological restoration workers in South Africa, and ask whether the common livelihood indicators used are adequate and sufficient, or whether any relevant indicators are missing. Results from the livelihood survey show the value of income, food and education as strong indicators of financial and human assets, and the importance of open-ended questions in eliciting details of workers’ perceived changes in their livelihoods. However, by complementing the survey results with qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and stakeholder workshops, we show how unconventional livelihood indicators and aspects provide a deeper understanding of changes in livelihoods that are tied to restoration projects. We guide scholars and practitioners to advance their process of selecting livelihood indicators, in particular to include three additional types of indicators: intangible indicators to assess life quality; relative indicators reaching across spatial and temporal scales to capture community outcomes and livelihood resilience; and, political indicators to uncover causal relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergenerational transmission is a crucial indicator for measuring the equality of opportunities in society. Higher levels of intergenerational transmission can suppress individual efforts and have severe negative impacts on various aspects such as distribution, growth, and innovation. This paper synthesises theoretical and empirical work on intergenerational human capital transmission from an extended family perspective in China. The majority of existent literature on intergenerational transmission only explores the correlation of parents and their own offspring in aspects of income or social status, and may lead to underestimation of the level of intergenerational transmission in society since it negelcts the potential impacts from clan networks. Building on the theoretical analysis, the study is designed to build up an extended family framework and provide insights into the overall intergenerational transmission of human capital in China, where historical tradition is deeprooted and clan networks are closely linked, using (CHIP) Chinese Household Income Project Survey, a longitudinal household-level dataset. We compile data from extended families including parents and grandparents, as well as parents’ siblings, and estimate the intergenerational transmission of human capital with two different measures, the schooling years and an index of occupational status. Our main findings show that the traditional parent–child intergenerational transmission model represents the lower bound of the intergenerational transmission coefficient, and parental siblings have a significant and positive effect on offspring’s human capital attainment, and the results remain solid after a bunch of robustness tests. We find significant heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of human capital by gender, birth cohorts or rural–urban residency. The multigenerational effects of grandparents on descendants are not significant after controlling for the human capital levels of parents and their siblings. Using a sample of non-biological offspring as a comparison group, we find that the acquired family environment plays a more significant role than innate genes. Fundamentally, this study helps establish policies to enhance intergenerational mobility and social opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between economic adversity and voter participation in Turkish parliamentary elections. We employ a dynamic model of voter turnout using a cross-regional panel dataset covering all parliamentary elections for the 1987–2018 period. In addition to lagged voter turnout to account for persistency in electoral participation, our models include two measures of economic adversity: inflation, and economic growth. Empirical results indicate that inflation has a positive and significant effect on voter turnout, while economic growth is insignificant in all specifications. Moreover, inflation is associated with higher voter turnout in provinces with a denser population, higher urbanization, and more abundant human capital. Regional voter turnout rates tend to persistently support the habit formation argument. Overall, our empirical results are consistent with the mobilization hypothesis, suggesting that adverse economic conditions lead to higher electoral participation by stimulating voters to punish the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to human capital theory, wages are determined by workers' productivity which, in its crudest form, implies that return to education does not depend on how workers' skills are used. However, after controlling for other differences, the empirical evidence shows that workers with identical education are paid differently. The literature evidences that young people are more likely to experience a mismatch between their formal education and the one required for their jobs. While there is no consensus on the reasons for the mismatch phenomenon, one consequence is clear, in terms of wages overeducation means a penalty. Our evidence shows that overeducated graduates of the Facultad de Ciencias Económicas of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba suffer a wage penalty compared to those working in a job that requires a university degree. The results are robust to different specifications and the use of alternative estimators. Even though is not statistically significant, the penalty of a severe level of overeducation is higher than one for a mild level of overeducation; having had work experience while studying at university helps to reduce the cost of overeducation; women exhibit a similar penalty to men. While on average overeducation means a wage penalty, there is great heterogeneity among overeducated graduates, with those at the top end of the wage distribution experiencing a much lower penalty, or even a premium in some cases. Finally, while in the case of overeducation we find statistically significant effects, the same is not true of the horizontal mismatch in terms of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various studies have investigated the population-growth dynamics and the human capital-growth dynamics without assessing the human capital-population-growth dynamics in a single context. This study fills the lacuna in the literature by interrogating if human capital tilts the population-economic growth dynamics in MENA countries. It provokes a new perspective and highlights findings on whether human capital is relevant in influencing the impact of population on economic growth? This empirical investigation uses two indicators of human capital: education enrolment and life expectancy at birth on an unbalanced panel data of 19 MENA countries from 1980 to 2020. The novel methodology of feasible generalized least squares and panel-corrected standard errors technique addressed our three objectives and we find that: (i) population growth and human capital indicators individually influence economic growth positively; (ii) the interaction effect is mixed; and (ii) the net effect of population growth on economic growth when human capital is accounted for is mostly positive. Further examination of the results reveal that primary education exerts the most impact among the education indicators while life expectancy is the most potent human capital indicator. These outcomes highlights the relevance of both measures of human capital and supports the discourse that neither education nor health is a perfect substitute for the other as a measure of human capital. Policy recommendations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's creative economy, ideas and intellectual capital have replaced natural resources, and human creativity is the ultimate source of economic growth. Creative Capital selects specific cities and regions for work and living, known as creative cities; Cities that have the greatest capacity to attract, retain and nurture creative capital. This research aims to assess where Teheran stands both internationally and nationally among the most creative cities, known for their capacity to attract, retain and nurture creative economy, ideas and intellectual capital. First, a creative city framework is developed based on a review of 11 existing creative city indices. Second, based on their frequency of use, relevance and data availability 40 indicators were identified and computed. Using the VIKOR Method, an effective multi-criteria decision-making approach for diverging indicators, a national and international benchmarking analysis is performed on Teheran and selected cities. Results from the national benchmarking suggest that Teheran generally outperform the other Iran metropolis in 16 indicators. However, results from the international benchmarking show mix findings, where Teheran is well ranked in the human capital factor, and needs improvement in other factors including territorial assets, tolerance and resilience, and R&D and technology. Policy implications are discussed in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effect of parental aspirations gap on children's educational attainment between 2007 and 2014, using two waves of Indonesian Family Life Survey data. The aspirations gap is measured by the difference between one's future reference point and his or her current life evaluation reported by each household head and spouse. The results show that boys whose fathers report a moderate level of the aspirations gap achieve substantially longer schooling years than the mean level of their same age cohort. Furthermore, the relationship is found to be inversely U-shaped, implying that an excessive aspirations gap discourages investment in children's human capital. An increasing aspirations gap of parents is also found to impede the educational attainment of children in poor families, which are more vulnerable to shocks that are found to increase the gap. Overall, the results of this paper shed light on the role of parental aspirations gap in the link between socioeconomic status of family and educational outcomes of children in Indonesia, where the gap of the poor is found to increase faster than the rich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multivariate nature of academic well-being makes difficult to provide a single definition, and finding adequate measures is a difficult task. We accomplished this purpose using job satisfaction and work engagement as measures for academic well-being thanks to the results obtained from the project PIR 2012 "Productivity of Italian Researchers" and the results of the questionnaire UWES-17 administered to Italian scholars. The territorial element appeared to be important to analyse properly the phenomenon of well-being; in particular, we used two notions of territoriality. One aimed to gather information relatively to the perception of the Italian academic system with respect to foreign systems and was mainly concerned with job satisfaction. The other one aimed to gather information at the regional level, comparing the three dimensions of work engagement by macro-areas. The results of our research indicate that there is a lower perception of the Italian system respect to foreign countries because of insufficient career opportunities and an inadequate administrative and bureaucratic structure. This reveals dissatisfaction of Italian academic workers and low academic well-being. From the second analysis we learn that there are significant differences among the engagement scores obtained in different Italian macro-areas but, most importantly, the mean value of engagement in all the areas was only "average". Low levels of engagement may be the result of low levels of well-being. This empirical analysis offers precious data and suggestions for the Italian policy maker and, in general, for policy makers of similar countries. Enhancing the satisfaction and the engagement of academic workers is fundamental to prevent detrimental outflows of skilled human capital and to attract foreign skilled human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines human capital inequality and how it relates to earnings inequality in Portugal using data from Quadros de Pessoal for the period 1986–2017. The objective is threefold: (i) show how the distribution of human capital has evolved over time; (ii) investigate the association between human capital inequality and earnings inequality; and (iii) analyse the role of returns to schooling, together with human capital inequality, in the explanation of earnings inequality. Our findings suggest that human capital inequality, computed based on the distribution of average years of schooling of employees working in the Portuguese private labour market, records a positive trend until 2007 and decreases from this year onwards, suggesting the existence of a Kuznets curve of education relating educational attainment levels and education inequality. Based on the decomposition of a Generalized Entropy index (Theil N) for earnings inequality, we observe that inequality in the distribution of human capital plays an important role in the explanation of earnings inequality, although this role has become less important over the last decade. Using Mincerian earnings regressions to estimate the returns to schooling together with the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition of real hourly earnings we confirm that there are two important forces associated with the observed decrease in earnings inequality: a reduction in education inequality and compressed returns to schooling, mainly in tertiary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between the social inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, and technological innovation. It empirically establishes that LGBT inclusion helps foster human capital skills, thus strengthening national innovative capacity. Exploiting cross-country data, this research provides suggestive evidence that social tolerance towards homosexuality is positively correlated with the economic complexity index, a novel measure of cross-country differences in innovative capabilities. Individual-level analyses, based on data from the World Values Survey, reveal that surveyed respondents who self-report tolerance towards homosexual acts tend to have positive attitudes towards technological innovation, ceteris paribus. This lends credence to the international evidence. Further analyses indicate that the link between LGBT inclusion and innovation is partially mediated through the accumulation of human capital. The main findings suggest that the social exclusion of LGBT people, at least to some extent, impedes long-run economic development by hindering innovative activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Correction to: Social Indicators Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02867-5 In the original publication of the article, the affiliation of two coauthors "Abdelaziz Boukhelkhal" and "Mohammad Musa Shafiq" has been mistakenly published online. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Correction to: Does Human Capital Tilt the Population-Economic Growth Dynamics?. [Extracted from the article]