Human Capital and the Convergence Process Among Countries

This paper examines the convergence process across countries for the period 1980–2000, giving special attention to the role of human capital as a conditioning factor. The originality of the study is in the use of new proxies for human capital, such as publications and patents ratio and the patents/articles ratio which reflect the efficiency of the scientific work, in contrast to the quantitative measures usually used in the growth literature. The analysis suggests that: (i) convergence is conditional on structural factors, population growth, human and physical capital; (ii) the new proxies of human capital control fairly well the different steady‐states among countries; (iii) the different levels of human capital affect countries differently, according to their levels of development. Higher levels of human capital are suitable to differentiate the convergence process among developed countries, and basic or intermediate levels are more suitable to differentiate convergence among the less developed countries.