Assessing the Impact of Human Capital on Economic Growth in Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Countries: Analysis of the Underlying Relationship in the Short and Long Term

Abstract

The theory of economic growth continues to develop in order to provide answers to stylized facts sometimes marked by paradoxes. These paradoxes are linked to several research problems. In this article, we will try to take into account these problems, especially of a methodological nature to explain the economic growth of certain countries of the South and East of the Mediterranean (SEMC), in this case Morocco, Tunisia. , Jordan and Lebanon. To do this, we will first establish an indicator measuring the stock of human capital in each country making up our sample. Indeed, the indicator to be constructed by us will overcome the classic measures, which were based solely on education as the proxy of human capital. In this wake, we are going to make use of both the educational and health dimensions. At the modeling level, the application of the Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) model in our empirical context, using a VECM, reveals a certain number of observations regarding the contribution of human capital to creation wealth in the said countries of the study. In this sense, human capital is not related to the economic growth of SEMCs over the long term. Regarding the short-term relationship, the human capital factor has a negative impact, and sometimes makes no sense in the growth equation of the countries of the study, which calls into question the policies taken vis-à-vis the variables of interest. Moreover, the study shows that these countries optimize very slowly the resources for economic growth at their disposal, because the speed of adjustment towards the general equilibrium does not exceed 11% each year. In this study, we could have enlarged the sample to cover all the countries of the PSEM group. However, some of these countries have political problems, which would skew the analysis in question.

JEL Classification : O47

Article type : Applied research.