Professor Haizheng Li has received a grant for the project “Human Capital Measurement and China Human Capital Index Construction.” The funds for this project come from various sources, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China (a NSF counterpart in China).
The preliminary human capital index of China from this project was released in an international symposium held in Beijing, October 9-10, and has been very well received. In this conference, Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, and Professor Dale Jorgenson, both of whom pioneered human capital measurement, delivered keynote speeches. After the conference, OECD Statistics Directorate sent an official recommendation to the National Bureau of Statistics of China for Professor Haizheng Li’s research team to be China’s official participant to the OECD Human Capital Consortium.
The initial working paper from this project has appeared in NBER working paper series,http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15500
The goal of this project is to establish China’s first set of systematic and scientific measurement of human capital, and quantify its distribution and dynamics. It will lead to the construction of human capital indices at the national and provincial levels of the economy. This index system, once established, can be used to support empirical research to identify the role of human capital in economic growth and development, as well as support policy analysis.
This project will be carried on by an international research team, including Professor Barbara Fraumen, who proposed the main stream method in measuring human capital with Professor Dale Jorgenson (the J-F approach). This research represents part of the work from China to join the ongoing international efforts in measuring human capital. It aims for China’s human capital measures to become an important part of the nascent international human capital measurement system, and eventually to be incorporated into the China National Income Accounting system.
