The growth effects of education in Australia

The growth effects of human capital, measured in various ways, are controversial and inconclusive. In this paper we estimate the growth effect of human capital with country specific time series data for Australia. In doing so, we extended the Solow (1956) growth model by using educational attainment as a measure of human capital developed by Barro and Lee (2010). The extended Solow (1956) model performs well after allowing for the presence of structural changes. Our results, based on alternative time series methods, show that educational attainment has a small and significant permanent effect on the growth rate of per worker output in Australia. For comparison of results, alternative measures of human capital are also utilized.