Schooling, Labour Force Quality and the Growth of Nations: Comment

Hanushek and Kimko (2000) concluded that, for a sample of nearly 80 countries, the quality of the labour force is significantly positively related to economic growth rates for the period 1960-1990 and is more important that mean years of schooling. In this paper, we further test the robustness of their result by firstly including in the original model a proxy for labour force health, and secondly by re-estimating the model for a later sample period. We conclude that the findings of Hanushek and Kimko are not robust to these changes. In particular, their measure of labour force quality is significantly but negatively related to economic growth rates for the later sample period.