Creative Human Capital And Economic Growth

With knowledge economy arising and developing rapidly, as the source of technological progress human capital is more and more regarded as the engine of economic growth and hence the crucial factor which explains the divergence in growth rates across counties and regions. But some existing empirical studies show its explanation is different in different counties and regions or at different stages of economic development. An important realistic problem which closely connents to it is: despite the rapid growth of China's economy and a large increase in human capital stocks, the contribution of its technological progress is much less than that of developed even some developing counties. More and more scholars are focusing on these problems, they try to answer such questions as what is the cause of these divergence? Is it because some types of human capital affect growth weakly? Will economic growth be driven mainly by which type of human capital?This paper researches into above-mentioned problems by technological approach which comes from human capital, human capital classification, creative human capital, technological innovation to economic growth. Firstly, we focus on tile quality aspect of human capital, and classify human capital into three types: general, skillful and creative according to the theory of human capital, modern education and phychology. Then we analyse the essence of the concept of creative human capital and its character, and make an empirical study on the impacting mechanism of creative human capital on economic growth as well as its contribution. Our main conclusions of this dissertation are: (1) The essencial character of creative human capital lies in innovation, it influences economic growth indirectly as the engine of technological innovation, further more, its marginal returns is increasing. (2) With the constraints imposed by the market, resources and technology enhancing, the contribution of creative human capital to growth tends to be strengthened. (3) The rational allocation is prerequisite for human capital to be used efficiently. Our empirical study indicates that different type of human capital has different impacting mechanism, so only on condition that human capital is allocated rationally can it get the highest productivity. As for creative human capital, this point is especially important. Finally, based on the empirical findings of this paper, we give some positive suggestions: (1) Speeding further up the development of higher education and increase in creative human capitalstocks can enhance the competence of China's technology and enlarge the contribution of technological progress. (2) Enhancing system innovation and making use of creative human capital more efficiently will relieve the contradiction between the short supply of creative human capital and its strong demand, and prompt the long-run economic growth of our country.