人力资本向下兼容性及其对跨国收入水平核算的意义

Downward Compatibility of Human Capital and its Implication for the Cross-country Income Level Accounting

本文将人力资本的向下兼容性考虑到人力资本总量的度量当中,提出了一种比传统人力资本加总方法更加一般化的方法。利用本文得到的人力资本总量,我们还进行了跨国收入水平核算。与Klenow和Rodriguez Clare( 1 997)、Hall和Jones( 1 999)以及近几年研究的主要结论相反,本文的结论是人力资本和物质资本对于跨国收入差异的贡献与生产率的贡献相比是主要的。本文的贡献主要有两方面,一是提出了一种更加一般化的人力资本加总方法,二是使我们对造成跨国收入巨大差异原因的认识又回到了Mankiw ,RomerandWeil( 1 992 )的著名论断,从而回应了Klenow和Rodriguez Clare( 1 997)、Hall和Jones( 1 999)以及近几年研究对Mankiw ,RomerandWeil ( 1 992 )的批评,有力地支持了“新古典复兴”。

Downward compatibility is one of the salient characteristics of human capital, that is the human capital with higher level can do work that the low-level human capital does but not the vice-versa. In the paper, we incorporate the idea of downward compatibility into the aggregation of human capital and generalize the traditional aggregation approach. By using the measurement of aggregate human capital obtained in this paper, we do the cross-country income level accounting and find that human capital and physical capital is the major source of cross-country income difference, which is contrary to the conclusion of Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare (1997), Hall and Jones (1999), as well as other recent studies. The contribution of this paper is two-folded. On the one hand, we put forward a more general approach to aggregate the human capital. On the other, we resuscitate the conclusion of Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) and prevent it from the criticism of Klenow and Rodriguez (1997) and subsequent studies. Thus the paper strongly supports the “neo-classical revival”.