Човешкият капитал в съвременните икономически изследвания: Систематичен преглед на литературата за страните от централна и източна Европа

Abstract

Agrowing number of studies have been focusing on the role of human capital in the contemporary economies. This determines the increasing need of a systematization of the knowledge gained along with a comparative analysis of the scientific outcomes. The paper represents an overview of the current state of the publications exploring the link between education and growth in the New EU Member States from Central and Eastern Europe by utilizing the systematic literature review approach. The latter is applied to two of the most popular abstract and citation databases of peer-reviewed references in the Social Science field – SCOPUS and Web of Science – over the period 1996-2016. The methodology and the results at each stage of the study are discussed. For the 14 works satisfying the criteria for inclusion, a comparative analysis regarding the sample, the method of study, the human capital indicator as well as the main results has been presented. The literature review shows that regardless of the small scale of research on the post-communist economies, the works follow the methodology of the leading papers on the topic under consideration. In general, higher educational attainment of the population is positively correlated with the real growth rate. A direction for future work on the target countries specifically could be the differentiation of the effects of the educational levels or the quality and the quantity of human capital on the changes of economic activity in the long run.