Does Higher Education Promote Human Capital Development: Comparison of Russia and OECD Countries

Abstract

The aim of the study is to identify the key determinants of human capital in Russia compared to OECD states. This is done using the quantitative methodology, namely an OLS regression method. This method allows for indicating linear relationships between human capital represented by the human capital index developed by the World Bank and a set of factors potentially affecting this indicator. The explored factors include higher education enrolment, level of innovations, per capita income, inflation, unemployment rate, rankings of national universities and academic activity. The study is conducted for years 2010, 2012, 2017 and 2018 for which human capital index estimations are available. The findings underline a significant and positive linkage between secondary and tertiary education enrolment and human capital. In addition, R&D expenditures appear to have a positive impact on human capital as well. This emphasises that investment in science-oriented higher education and innovations contribute to the economic wellbeing of future generations reflected by the human capital index. Also, some positive relationship between the university rankings and human capital is identified although not for all years. The specific of Russian higher education is a huge gap between theoretic education and practice. The share of population with secondary and tertiary education and the number of published scientific articles is higher in Russia than the average across OECD. However, the share of practitioners in science and the percentage of R&D expenditures in GDP are significantly lower in Russia